LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem

So much has been said about disco-punk's King Midas, New York musician/ producer James Murphy, that's its kind of hard to believe that we've had to wait until 2005 for the debut album from his dancefloor project, LCD Soundsystem. LCD's classic triumvirate of early singles – "Losing My Edge", "Give It Up", and "Yeah"--joined the dots between punk-rock, disco, and funk in a way that hadn't been seen since the New York downtown scene of the early '80s, but these are bravely relegated to a bonus disc in favour of a suite of new material that rework the band's influences in new, often explicit ways: take "Movement", for instance – a homage to The Fall that finds Murphy barking "It's a fat guy/ In a T-shirt/Doing all the singing!" over punchy analogue synths, or the quietly majestic "Great Release", a doff of the cap to Brian Eno circa Taking Tiger Mountain. For all his encyclopaedic musical knowledge, however, it's one of Murphy's strengths that he seldom seems uptight about the practise of music-making: it's how he can get away with penning a gonzo disco-punk number and naming it something as fantastically flippant as "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House"--and more importantly, it's why LCD Soundsystem succeeds as a splendid dance record as well as a smart intellectual exercise. --Louis Pattison