#2600 LCD Soundsystem - American Dream

I've put this on a couple nights now, and it just puts me to sleep. Bear with me.

LCD used to get you ready to fuckinrock, used to reinforce your most romantic notions and buttress your deepest and most petty fears. They used to have you reaching for the stars.

But there's something in this new one that lulls me into the ground. It is the sound of a sympathetic, familiar guide who seems to have given up, and who invites you to give up too, and suddenly, unexpectedly, my worries are eroded, and I might be able to go to sleep tonight without a fight.

How could you make an LCD Soundsystem album in 2017? When the band's come and gone and come back, into a party that's fallen apart in the interim, where everyone is sick, and someone's making increasingly believable threats, and the cops aren't coming, and would it be better or worse if they were.

You do it with an album with song titles in all lowercase. With a title that's half-ironic, half-defeated, half-here, and sentiments that follow suit. It's music to die to, with the thinnest possible layers all piled one on the next. It's music that stretches slowly, just this side of boring, reprogramming your heartbeats, not to dance, but to the rhythm that's needed to make it to tomorrow and the next year and the next term of four, or four terms more, as the situation demands.

Counterpoint: "you should be uncomfortable!" Murphy exclaims. This is a full panic record, one that recognizes that the world is not ok, that maybe the place for wry winks about Losing My Edge aren't going to fly. But man it's exhausting.

More so than any of their previous albums, it feels like the work of a band. And it feels like a rock album, full of weight. And it feels like an experimental album, mostly devoid of hooks, here to melt your space-time, a downtrodden album that feels akin to Everything Now, another miserable, simmering piece of disco-adjacent sludge -- mostly unpleasant, but the medicine we need, maybe.

"I'm still trying...to wake up / I'm still trying...to wake up"

If I've been too subtle lately, let me be clear. The world is in a very bad place and so am I. And so are musicians with any awareness of the world whatsoever. And if we have the luxury of existence in a few decades, and the unlikely luxury of history was we know it by then, then that history will look back on this time with much interest, and all the miserable, peaceful, angry, soporific, desperate albums like this will tell the tale 4/5