Laughing At Everything We Thought Was Important

LCD Soundsystem “Tonite”

LCD Soundsystem’s American Dream has all the familiar components of an LCD Soundsystem record, but the feel of the music is different in ways that are not easy to articulate. It’s like having a set of ingredients for a recipe you know well, but changing up the cooking methods. Some parts have a very different character – there’s a lot of lead guitar parts through the album that indicate that James Murphy has spent much of the past few years obsessing over Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew – while the beats click and hit with characteristic precision.

Another metaphor: It’s all the same furniture, but rearranged, and with the addition of some accent pillows and maybe some new art on the wall. As if to say, “you can go home again, but it just feels a bit weird.” But the weirdness seems to be part of the point, and this greater feeling of loss and being lost and frustration and exasperation and doubt. James Murphy could – should? – be returning to LCD Soundsystem as a conquering hero, but instead he’s just as shellshocked and anxious and powerless as anyone else these days.

“Tonite” is the album’s banger, and the song that would’ve made the most sense alongside the group’s earliest material. It’s also the song where Murphy’s acute self-awareness seems to collapse on itself. The whole album is like him trying to talk his way through his feelings, like he’s doing talk therapy and hoping that he lands on something profound in his ramblings. There’s a lot of good observations in “Tonite” – the remarks about other artists’ music are clever, but as usual, it’s the lines about aging that really get under the skin. The big question this time around: If we can acknowledge that the current version of ourselves is probably the best one, or at least less embarrassing than previous attempts at getting it together, then why do we romanticize the past and youth so much? Sure, the clock is ticking, but we can at least try to go out on top.

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