This Is Happening

After only listening to the first track of This is Happening, I already had this entire review set out in my mind. I was going to start by talking about how everyone rightly lost their shit for Sound of Silver in 2007, refreshing my memory with gushing pieces of the time (‘It's an absolute joy to listen to, for every possible reason’ or ‘This is dance-rock for grown-ups: extraordinary’) before shaping the same general sentiment into my own hyperbolic sentences. I’d inevitably say something about New York, emphasising the influence and importance of environment in the music that James Murphy makes, pretentiously referencing Will Self’s Psychogeographic trek to said city in which he searches for ‘that urgent commingling of blood and soil’. Then after the grand build up and the not-so subtle implication that any release post-Silver would have to be something pretty special to match or surpass it, I’d hit out with the reveal that, HE’S ONLY GONE AND BLOODY DONE IT!!! Amidst the jubilation I’d take the middle section to say exactly why the songs are so good and the final third would wrap everything up with some waffle about 2010 being the year of artists bettering their best using Laura Marling, Joanna Newsom and The National to hold up my flimsy argument, until a finish containing the obligatory reference to ‘Losing My Edge’ as the statement that will always define the man and the music, and some boo-hoo about this seemingly being the final LCD Soundsystem installment.

While discussing the burden of influence in 2005, James Murphy told us, "The Strokes are swimming up some incredibly serious stuff: Velvet Underground. Television. It's kinda soul-crushing in a way to listen to 'Perfect Day' and say, 'I'm gonna go write a song like that,' and it'll be fucking horrible by comparison." At that point, the Strokes had yet to squander their leather-clad, LES cool, and LCD Soundsystem were still, mostly, a Williamsburg blip. But over the past five years, things changed. Drastically. In 2010, early aughts trendsetters like Interpol and the Strokes are NYC relics, outpaced by a gang of stridently preppy, chart-topping Columbia grads and a 40-year-old Brian Eno obsessive. On This Is Happening, Murphy once again shows off his encyclopedic knowledge of all things post-punk and zip-tight. But he's also swimming up some serious stuff himself, including Eno and David Bowie's sacrosanct Berlin trilogy. And against his own prediction, it's far from horrible; it's actually pretty perfect.