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Track List
01) Oh Baby
02) Other Voices
03) I Used To
04) Change Yr Mind
05) How Do You Sleep?
06) Tonite
07) Call the Police
08) American Dream
09) Emotional Haircut
10) Black Screen
01) Oh Baby
02) Other Voices
03) I Used To
04) Change Yr Mind
05) How Do You Sleep?
06) Tonite
07) Call the Police
08) American Dream
09) Emotional Haircut
10) Black Screen
5:49
6:43
5:32
4:57
9:12
5:47
6:58
6:06
5:29
12:05
Data Complete
80%
Total Rating
80%Total Rating
(4 users)
Back Cover
CD Art
3D Case
3D Thumb
3D Flat
3D Face
3D Spine
First Released
2017
Electronic
Passionate
Electronic
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0 copies
Album Description
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American Dream (stylized on digital releases as american dream) is the fourth studio album by American rock band LCD Soundsystem, released on September 1, 2017, by DFA and Columbia. It was first announced on January 5, 2016, the day after it was revealed that the band was reuniting after a disbandment lasting nearly five years. It is the band's first album in seven years, following This Is Happening (2010).
Prior to release, LCD Soundsystem performed at large music festivals as well as smaller shows to promote their reunion. "Call the Police" and "American Dream" were released together as the album's lead single on May 5, 2017, and "Tonite" was released as the second single on August 16, 2017. The album received widespread acclaim from music critics. The album performed well commercially and became the band's first number-one album in the United States, Canada, and Portugal. At the 60th Annual Grammy Awards, the album will be up for Best Alternative Music Album and "Tonite" will be up for Best Dance Recording.
Background
LCD Soundsystem's third and previous studio album, This Is Happening, was released in 2010. After the album's release, the band announced their breakup in early 2011 and also announced that they would end with a show at Madison Square Garden on April 2, 2011. Due to the raising of ticket prices by scalpers, the band made plans to perform warm-up shows at Terminal 5 in Manhattan, New York. After their final show, they released a documentary film in 2012, which followed the band prior to the show and featured footage of the actual performance. A live album with the audio from the show was released in 2014 as a Record Store Day release.
In October 2015, online publication Consequence of Sound reported that "multiple sources" could confirm that LCD Soundsystem would be reuniting in 2016 and that they would be headlining "high-profile music festivals in the US and UK." This report was later confirmed by Billboard. However, DFA Records label manager Kris Petersen stated that LCD Soundsystem would not be reuniting. DFA co-founder Jonathan Galkin also confirmed this in a Pitchfork article. Two months afterward, the band released the Christmas-themed track "Christmas Will Break Your Heart", acting as their first piece of new material since their cover of Franz Ferdinand's "Live Alone", released in 2011. Consequence of Sound and Pitchfork both reported again, after the release of the Christmas single, that multiple sources could confirm a reunion in 2016.
On January 4, 2016, it was officially announced that LCD Soundsystem would be headlining the 2016 Coachella Festival. The following day, the band announced that they would be releasing a new album some time in 2016, although they were not yet entirely finished with the album. It was later revealed that the band signed with Columbia Records. Murphy explained his reasoning for the reunion in a post on the band's website. He stated that he didn't want to release a solo album with live performances including LCD Soundsystem members, nor did he want to release an LCD Soundsystem album with entirely different people playing live, that is, if the original members didn't want to create a new record. He had invited past members Nancy Whang and Pat Mahoney to his apartment to talk about releasing new material, where they both agreed on making a new LCD Soundsystem record together.
Recording
The band recorded the album in multiple locations. Like previous albums Sound of Silver and This Is Happening, one of the recording locations was DFA Studios in New York City. Murphy announced after finishing recording that American Dream would be the last record to be recorded at the original DFA Studios building. Recording also took place at the Strongroom and Church studios in London, the Lanark Studio in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and B-Side Studios in Portland, Oregon. The band were forced to cancel tour dates for shows in Asia and Australia dated during the near-end of 2016 in order to complete work on the album. After this was revealed, it was suggested that the release date for the album would be moved into 2017, as opposed to the original prediction of 2016, as the recording was predicted to take another few months. It was noted in April 2017 that the band had been working on the album for 18 months. In a Facebook post released in May, Murphy announced that the album was finished and that it was prepped for mastering.
Composition
American Dream has been described as featuring dance-punk, new wave, post-punk, synthpop and art rock throughout. Critics noted it as similar to David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy. The album's lyrics deal with depression, social issues, fear, and ending of friendship and love.
The album's closing track, "Black Screen" is a homage to Bowie. Murphy wanted to get Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen to perform a spoken word piece at the end of the track, but Cohen died only a few days after he came up with the idea.
Packaging
The cover art for American Dream was revealed on August 4, 2017. The artwork, which has been labeled as "straightforward" and having a "simple aesthetic", is a painting titled UP done by Murphy's friend Robert Reynolds. It consists of a blue sky with a few clouds and a white-hot sun in the middle. The band's name and the album title are aligned on top of the painting. It has also been labeled as the band's most colorful artwork to date. People thought of the artwork as a possible homage to the front cover of the 1996 David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest, a book that James Murphy had previously read before he engaged in a serious career of music. After the artwork was revealed, it attracted criticism from users on Twitter. One user jokingly stated that they considered cancelling their vinyl pre-order of the album due to their dislike of the cover art. Other users compared it, quality-wise, to a preset for a slide on Microsoft PowerPoint as well as the cover art for Kasabian's 2017 album For Crying Out Loud.
The vinyl release of the album features a gatefold containing two vinyl records, both weighing 140 grams each. A code that grants the buyer with a digital download of the album was also included with the purchase of the vinyl release. The gatefold jacket and inner sleeves are both done in full color. The cassette release includes custom silk-screened cases and shells. The case contains a five-sided insert that is also done in full color and the cassette shell is clear-colored.
User Album Review
f course James Murphy fell for his own rock’n’roll myth. This is the guy who entered the realm of semi-stardom 15 years ago with “Losing My Edge,” a song that both poked fun at and paid tribute to music snobbery, that imagined a miracle man who witnessed every “seminal” underground event up-close, that used a list of cooler-than-thou names as an impenetrable shield. It made sense for him to concoct his very own “I was there” moment on April 2, 2011, when LCD Soundsystem played what was billed as their final show at the most storied venue in New York City. It was instantly legendary, the underdog’s big day. A perfect ending. Too perfect, maybe.
As an ace student of the game—“LCD is a band about a band writing music about writing music,” he once quipped—Murphy knew that he couldn’t just reunite for a lucrative victory lap, playing his most popular songs on Spotify to the genre-agnostic, dance-friendly demographic he helped cultivate throughout the 2000s. It would ruin the legacy and go against everything LCD stood for: integrity, respect, a sly but genuine love of just how much music can shape a human being’s identity. So even though a new album was always planned since the band officially reformed 20 months ago, the intervening hit-filled gigs could feel odd. Yes, they sounded great, and all the members looked excited to be playing together again, but the context was tweaked. LCD Soundsystem were no longer on the cusp of a cultish zeitgeist. Murphy still sang “this could be the last time” during “All My Friends,” though the line’s tang of finality was dulled.
For his part, Murphy recently promised to never make a show of LCD’s retirement ever again. But as much as the band’s fourth album, American Dream, marks a rebirth, it’s also obsessed with endings: of friendships, of love, of heroes, of a certain type of geeky fandom, of the American dream itself. These are big, serious topics for a project that essentially started as a goof, but it’s the direction Murphy has taken since Sound of Silver’s “Someone Great” combined his affection for bubbling synths with a poignancy about the fleeting nature of life. Now, as a 47-year-old father of a young child, Murphy is using his long-running affection for bygone post-punk and art-rock sounds to carry on traditions; the album includes pointed references to Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Suicide’s Alan Vega, and David Bowie, all of whom passed in the years since LCD’s last record. Whereas Murphy once took on all of these influences lightly and cleverly, they feel heavier across much of American Dream’s 70 minutes, with the lingering responsibilities of a disappearing history becoming more apparent.
On paper, that might sound like a bit of a slog, but this is not the case. Roughly half of the album is buoyed by the twitching rhythms and spirited mumble-rants that Murphy, who once again plays the vast majority of the instruments himself, is known for. Soon-to-be live scorcher “Emotional Haircut” is ostensibly a lark about an old rocker dude trying to cling onto some youth by-way-of a trendy new ’do—but it doesn’t stop with the easy joke. The song’s intensity comes from Murphy’s identification with this character who absorbs pummelling frequencies at very high volumes in order to quell the anxieties of aging. “You got numbers on your phone of the dead that you can’t delete,” he yelps as the music notches up to a panic. “And you got life-affirming moments in your past that you can’t repeat.” It’s at once funny, terrifying, and strangely reassuring.
A similar emotional brew rumbles through the burbling “Tonite,” which reads like an updated treatise in defense of a certain type of outmoded music nerd—or, as Murphy oh-so-knowingly puts it, “a hobbled veteran of the disc-shop inquisition sent to parry the cocksure mem-stick filth with my own late-era middle-aged ramblings.” It’s a pep talk for those who’ve felt duped by late capitalism’s gobbling up of punk values in the name of branding and moneyed elitism. Sure, this might be easy for James Murphy to say—as a Coachella headliner and Williamsburg wine bar owner, he’s not exactly in the DIY trenches—but, as music recedes ever further into the background of popular culture, such bemused wishful thinking can’t hurt. Fandom comes up again on “Change Yr Mind,” where Murphy wades into comment sections, both parroting and rebuffing those who doubted the return of LCD Soundsystem. After a litany of taunts and self-doubt elbowed between Robert Fripp-style guitar shocks, the singer comes to a simple epiphany: “You can change your mind,” he repeats, as the static track cracks open. This is the freeing sound of losing followers.
The idea of change, and whether or not it’s truly possible, has been a recurring theme for Murphy, and American Dream has him taking some legitimate steps away from his renowned style. While the album’s classic-sounding LCD tracks are comfortably familiar, they can also feel redundant, unnecessary reminders that struggle to supplant Murphy’s own past glories. So the record’s newfangled moves don’t just offer variety, they provide American Dream’s most rewarding moments and serve as the best justifications of this reformed group’s continued existence.
Take album opener “Oh Baby,” Murphy’s attempt at the type of unsettlingly pretty tick-tick slow burner that turned Suicide into subversive NYC icons. The song is decidedly mid-tempo. And Murphy isn’t rambling here—he’s crooning. Very convincingly. Sexily, even. It’s a breakup song (Murphy went through a divorce around the time LCD disbanded in 2011) stuck somewhere between a bad dream and reality. And unlike so many LCD songs, which are marked by the hyper-specificity of an obsessive-compulsive creator, “Oh Baby” feels spacious and inviting. You don’t have to be a laid-off record store clerk to fully understand this song’s intricacies. Like Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream,” which has been covered by everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Neneh Cherry, “Oh Baby” is the type of track could be successfully pulled off by creep-show genius Ariel Pink or Rat Pack redux Michael Bublé.
Murphy keeps dreaming on “I Used To,” another winning outlier. He seems to be peeking through to the past, to his formative rock influences, trying to confront their mysterious force. The searching song is brought further into focus by its stalking bassline and hulking, unfussy drum beat—turn your ear the right way, and this is what a Led Zeppelin post-punk album could have sounded like, with a stinging guitar solo coming halfway from hell. Staying in this more diabolical lane, the nearly 10-minute centerpiece “How Do You Sleep?” is tempestuous, ecstatic, and utterly, utterly savage. Sharing a name with John Lennon’s infamous 1971 takedown of Paul McCartney following the dissolution of the Beatles, the song is almost certainly a salvo aimed at Murphy’s estranged DFA production partner, Tim Goldsworthy—aka the guy Murphy’s label sued for nearly $100,000 in missing funds in 2013, aka the guy who called Murphy an over-therapized bully and a sociopath, and admitted to having “weird reoccurring dreams of ‘Game of Thrones’-style deaths for him” in the recent New York rock oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom. So, yeah. These two men no longer like each other.
For all the bad blood, though, “How Do You Sleep?” is not a guns-out rocker or a punch line-stuffed lyrical skewering. It’s painstaking in its build, amassing ominous percussion and gargantuan bass synth tones before the full rhythm finally straps in after more than five minutes. Meanwhile, Murphy mixes enigmatic taunts with more direct swipes, hollering from deep in the mix: “I must admit: I miss the laughing/But not so much you.” This is venom, but it’s expertly controlled venom. The song works astoundingly well without any backstory, as a universal, fist-pumping broadside directed at former friends everywhere, but it’s even more damning with its likely target in mind. You almost feel pity for Goldsworthy—but then the beat connects and, well, he must have done something wrong to deserve such an epic shaming. And still, there is a bittersweet element in acknowledging the loss of someone who’s still living, a haunting presence no longer felt.
Another ghost inhabits the album’s final track, “Black Screen,” but the situation is flipped: The person is no longer alive yet they are sorely missed. No name is mentioned in the song, but there is reason to believe it is a belated message for David Bowie, who befriended and collaborated with Murphy in the last few years of his life. In fact, Murphy was once considered to be a co-producer on Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, though in the end he only officially contributed percussion to a couple of tracks. Since some of LCD Soundsystem’s best tracks have been thinly disguised love letters to Bowie’s influence, why didn’t Murphy fully take the chance to work with one of his deepest musical loves? “Black Screen” gives us some answers. “I had fear in the room,” Murphy sings in his smallest voice, “so I stopped turning up.” This is not a flip comment; it is sorrowful. Regretful. Painfully vulnerable. The song glides along a straightforward sonar-blip beat, with Murphy recalling his relationship with his idol in quiet awe, eventually conjuring an image of interstellar infinity. It concludes with pulses and piano that would not sound out-of-place on the dark side of a Bowie art-rock opus—an ending that could go on forever.
SOURCE: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lcd-soundsystem-american-dream/
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User Comments
Available in:
American Dream (stylized on digital releases as american dream) is the fourth studio album by American rock band LCD Soundsystem, released on September 1, 2017, by DFA and Columbia. It was first announced on January 5, 2016, the day after it was revealed that the band was reuniting after a disbandment lasting nearly five years. It is the band's first album in seven years, following This Is Happening (2010).
Prior to release, LCD Soundsystem performed at large music festivals as well as smaller shows to promote their reunion. "Call the Police" and "American Dream" were released together as the album's lead single on May 5, 2017, and "Tonite" was released as the second single on August 16, 2017. The album received widespread acclaim from music critics. The album performed well commercially and became the band's first number-one album in the United States, Canada, and Portugal. At the 60th Annual Grammy Awards, the album will be up for Best Alternative Music Album and "Tonite" will be up for Best Dance Recording.
Background
LCD Soundsystem's third and previous studio album, This Is Happening, was released in 2010. After the album's release, the band announced their breakup in early 2011 and also announced that they would end with a show at Madison Square Garden on April 2, 2011. Due to the raising of ticket prices by scalpers, the band made plans to perform warm-up shows at Terminal 5 in Manhattan, New York. After their final show, they released a documentary film in 2012, which followed the band prior to the show and featured footage of the actual performance. A live album with the audio from the show was released in 2014 as a Record Store Day release.
In October 2015, online publication Consequence of Sound reported that "multiple sources" could confirm that LCD Soundsystem would be reuniting in 2016 and that they would be headlining "high-profile music festivals in the US and UK." This report was later confirmed by Billboard. However, DFA Records label manager Kris Petersen stated that LCD Soundsystem would not be reuniting. DFA co-founder Jonathan Galkin also confirmed this in a Pitchfork article. Two months afterward, the band released the Christmas-themed track "Christmas Will Break Your Heart", acting as their first piece of new material since their cover of Franz Ferdinand's "Live Alone", released in 2011. Consequence of Sound and Pitchfork both reported again, after the release of the Christmas single, that multiple sources could confirm a reunion in 2016.
On January 4, 2016, it was officially announced that LCD Soundsystem would be headlining the 2016 Coachella Festival. The following day, the band announced that they would be releasing a new album some time in 2016, although they were not yet entirely finished with the album. It was later revealed that the band signed with Columbia Records. Murphy explained his reasoning for the reunion in a post on the band's website. He stated that he didn't want to release a solo album with live performances including LCD Soundsystem members, nor did he want to release an LCD Soundsystem album with entirely different people playing live, that is, if the original members didn't want to create a new record. He had invited past members Nancy Whang and Pat Mahoney to his apartment to talk about releasing new material, where they both agreed on making a new LCD Soundsystem record together.
Recording
The band recorded the album in multiple locations. Like previous albums Sound of Silver and This Is Happening, one of the recording locations was DFA Studios in New York City. Murphy announced after finishing recording that American Dream would be the last record to be recorded at the original DFA Studios building. Recording also took place at the Strongroom and Church studios in London, the Lanark Studio in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and B-Side Studios in Portland, Oregon. The band were forced to cancel tour dates for shows in Asia and Australia dated during the near-end of 2016 in order to complete work on the album. After this was revealed, it was suggested that the release date for the album would be moved into 2017, as opposed to the original prediction of 2016, as the recording was predicted to take another few months. It was noted in April 2017 that the band had been working on the album for 18 months. In a Facebook post released in May, Murphy announced that the album was finished and that it was prepped for mastering.
Composition
American Dream has been described as featuring dance-punk, new wave, post-punk, synthpop and art rock throughout. Critics noted it as similar to David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy. The album's lyrics deal with depression, social issues, fear, and ending of friendship and love.
The album's closing track, "Black Screen" is a homage to Bowie. Murphy wanted to get Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen to perform a spoken word piece at the end of the track, but Cohen died only a few days after he came up with the idea.
Packaging
The cover art for American Dream was revealed on August 4, 2017. The artwork, which has been labeled as "straightforward" and having a "simple aesthetic", is a painting titled UP done by Murphy's friend Robert Reynolds. It consists of a blue sky with a few clouds and a white-hot sun in the middle. The band's name and the album title are aligned on top of the painting. It has also been labeled as the band's most colorful artwork to date. People thought of the artwork as a possible homage to the front cover of the 1996 David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest, a book that James Murphy had previously read before he engaged in a serious career of music. After the artwork was revealed, it attracted criticism from users on Twitter. One user jokingly stated that they considered cancelling their vinyl pre-order of the album due to their dislike of the cover art. Other users compared it, quality-wise, to a preset for a slide on Microsoft PowerPoint as well as the cover art for Kasabian's 2017 album For Crying Out Loud.
The vinyl release of the album features a gatefold containing two vinyl records, both weighing 140 grams each. A code that grants the buyer with a digital download of the album was also included with the purchase of the vinyl release. The gatefold jacket and inner sleeves are both done in full color. The cassette release includes custom silk-screened cases and shells. The case contains a five-sided insert that is also done in full color and the cassette shell is clear-colored.
User Album Review
f course James Murphy fell for his own rock’n’roll myth. This is the guy who entered the realm of semi-stardom 15 years ago with “Losing My Edge,” a song that both poked fun at and paid tribute to music snobbery, that imagined a miracle man who witnessed every “seminal” underground event up-close, that used a list of cooler-than-thou names as an impenetrable shield. It made sense for him to concoct his very own “I was there” moment on April 2, 2011, when LCD Soundsystem played what was billed as their final show at the most storied venue in New York City. It was instantly legendary, the underdog’s big day. A perfect ending. Too perfect, maybe.
As an ace student of the game—“LCD is a band about a band writing music about writing music,” he once quipped—Murphy knew that he couldn’t just reunite for a lucrative victory lap, playing his most popular songs on Spotify to the genre-agnostic, dance-friendly demographic he helped cultivate throughout the 2000s. It would ruin the legacy and go against everything LCD stood for: integrity, respect, a sly but genuine love of just how much music can shape a human being’s identity. So even though a new album was always planned since the band officially reformed 20 months ago, the intervening hit-filled gigs could feel odd. Yes, they sounded great, and all the members looked excited to be playing together again, but the context was tweaked. LCD Soundsystem were no longer on the cusp of a cultish zeitgeist. Murphy still sang “this could be the last time” during “All My Friends,” though the line’s tang of finality was dulled.
For his part, Murphy recently promised to never make a show of LCD’s retirement ever again. But as much as the band’s fourth album, American Dream, marks a rebirth, it’s also obsessed with endings: of friendships, of love, of heroes, of a certain type of geeky fandom, of the American dream itself. These are big, serious topics for a project that essentially started as a goof, but it’s the direction Murphy has taken since Sound of Silver’s “Someone Great” combined his affection for bubbling synths with a poignancy about the fleeting nature of life. Now, as a 47-year-old father of a young child, Murphy is using his long-running affection for bygone post-punk and art-rock sounds to carry on traditions; the album includes pointed references to Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Suicide’s Alan Vega, and David Bowie, all of whom passed in the years since LCD’s last record. Whereas Murphy once took on all of these influences lightly and cleverly, they feel heavier across much of American Dream’s 70 minutes, with the lingering responsibilities of a disappearing history becoming more apparent.
On paper, that might sound like a bit of a slog, but this is not the case. Roughly half of the album is buoyed by the twitching rhythms and spirited mumble-rants that Murphy, who once again plays the vast majority of the instruments himself, is known for. Soon-to-be live scorcher “Emotional Haircut” is ostensibly a lark about an old rocker dude trying to cling onto some youth by-way-of a trendy new ’do—but it doesn’t stop with the easy joke. The song’s intensity comes from Murphy’s identification with this character who absorbs pummelling frequencies at very high volumes in order to quell the anxieties of aging. “You got numbers on your phone of the dead that you can’t delete,” he yelps as the music notches up to a panic. “And you got life-affirming moments in your past that you can’t repeat.” It’s at once funny, terrifying, and strangely reassuring.
A similar emotional brew rumbles through the burbling “Tonite,” which reads like an updated treatise in defense of a certain type of outmoded music nerd—or, as Murphy oh-so-knowingly puts it, “a hobbled veteran of the disc-shop inquisition sent to parry the cocksure mem-stick filth with my own late-era middle-aged ramblings.” It’s a pep talk for those who’ve felt duped by late capitalism’s gobbling up of punk values in the name of branding and moneyed elitism. Sure, this might be easy for James Murphy to say—as a Coachella headliner and Williamsburg wine bar owner, he’s not exactly in the DIY trenches—but, as music recedes ever further into the background of popular culture, such bemused wishful thinking can’t hurt. Fandom comes up again on “Change Yr Mind,” where Murphy wades into comment sections, both parroting and rebuffing those who doubted the return of LCD Soundsystem. After a litany of taunts and self-doubt elbowed between Robert Fripp-style guitar shocks, the singer comes to a simple epiphany: “You can change your mind,” he repeats, as the static track cracks open. This is the freeing sound of losing followers.
The idea of change, and whether or not it’s truly possible, has been a recurring theme for Murphy, and American Dream has him taking some legitimate steps away from his renowned style. While the album’s classic-sounding LCD tracks are comfortably familiar, they can also feel redundant, unnecessary reminders that struggle to supplant Murphy’s own past glories. So the record’s newfangled moves don’t just offer variety, they provide American Dream’s most rewarding moments and serve as the best justifications of this reformed group’s continued existence.
Take album opener “Oh Baby,” Murphy’s attempt at the type of unsettlingly pretty tick-tick slow burner that turned Suicide into subversive NYC icons. The song is decidedly mid-tempo. And Murphy isn’t rambling here—he’s crooning. Very convincingly. Sexily, even. It’s a breakup song (Murphy went through a divorce around the time LCD disbanded in 2011) stuck somewhere between a bad dream and reality. And unlike so many LCD songs, which are marked by the hyper-specificity of an obsessive-compulsive creator, “Oh Baby” feels spacious and inviting. You don’t have to be a laid-off record store clerk to fully understand this song’s intricacies. Like Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream,” which has been covered by everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Neneh Cherry, “Oh Baby” is the type of track could be successfully pulled off by creep-show genius Ariel Pink or Rat Pack redux Michael Bublé.
Murphy keeps dreaming on “I Used To,” another winning outlier. He seems to be peeking through to the past, to his formative rock influences, trying to confront their mysterious force. The searching song is brought further into focus by its stalking bassline and hulking, unfussy drum beat—turn your ear the right way, and this is what a Led Zeppelin post-punk album could have sounded like, with a stinging guitar solo coming halfway from hell. Staying in this more diabolical lane, the nearly 10-minute centerpiece “How Do You Sleep?” is tempestuous, ecstatic, and utterly, utterly savage. Sharing a name with John Lennon’s infamous 1971 takedown of Paul McCartney following the dissolution of the Beatles, the song is almost certainly a salvo aimed at Murphy’s estranged DFA production partner, Tim Goldsworthy—aka the guy Murphy’s label sued for nearly $100,000 in missing funds in 2013, aka the guy who called Murphy an over-therapized bully and a sociopath, and admitted to having “weird reoccurring dreams of ‘Game of Thrones’-style deaths for him” in the recent New York rock oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom. So, yeah. These two men no longer like each other.
For all the bad blood, though, “How Do You Sleep?” is not a guns-out rocker or a punch line-stuffed lyrical skewering. It’s painstaking in its build, amassing ominous percussion and gargantuan bass synth tones before the full rhythm finally straps in after more than five minutes. Meanwhile, Murphy mixes enigmatic taunts with more direct swipes, hollering from deep in the mix: “I must admit: I miss the laughing/But not so much you.” This is venom, but it’s expertly controlled venom. The song works astoundingly well without any backstory, as a universal, fist-pumping broadside directed at former friends everywhere, but it’s even more damning with its likely target in mind. You almost feel pity for Goldsworthy—but then the beat connects and, well, he must have done something wrong to deserve such an epic shaming. And still, there is a bittersweet element in acknowledging the loss of someone who’s still living, a haunting presence no longer felt.
Another ghost inhabits the album’s final track, “Black Screen,” but the situation is flipped: The person is no longer alive yet they are sorely missed. No name is mentioned in the song, but there is reason to believe it is a belated message for David Bowie, who befriended and collaborated with Murphy in the last few years of his life. In fact, Murphy was once considered to be a co-producer on Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, though in the end he only officially contributed percussion to a couple of tracks. Since some of LCD Soundsystem’s best tracks have been thinly disguised love letters to Bowie’s influence, why didn’t Murphy fully take the chance to work with one of his deepest musical loves? “Black Screen” gives us some answers. “I had fear in the room,” Murphy sings in his smallest voice, “so I stopped turning up.” This is not a flip comment; it is sorrowful. Regretful. Painfully vulnerable. The song glides along a straightforward sonar-blip beat, with Murphy recalling his relationship with his idol in quiet awe, eventually conjuring an image of interstellar infinity. It concludes with pulses and piano that would not sound out-of-place on the dark side of a Bowie art-rock opus—an ending that could go on forever.
SOURCE: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lcd-soundsystem-american-dream/
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