LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver (2007)

1) Get Innocuous!; 2) Time to Get Away; 3) North American Scum; 4) Someone Great; 5) All My Friends; 6) Us v Them; 7) Watch the Tapes; 8) Sound of Silver; 9) New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down

Houses some of the most essential LCD Soundsystem songs, but clearly the transitional period between rag-tag indie disco hits and more cohesive statements.

Key tracks: "North American Scum", "Someone Great", "All My Friends"

 A transitional step for LCD Soundsystem, and in hindsight a weird choice to raise as the band’s canonical classic considering how unfocused it is. Sound of Silver is the sound of James Murphy stretching his legs and beginning to realise his scope and ambitions as a songwriter, not content on simply churning out more witty indie disco jams in vein of the debut. The dance rock is still present and it’s the main flavour, but Sound of Silver is most characterised by Murphy’s big step into a more personal and serious style of songwriting, both lyrically and musically. The result is a mish-mash, a quilt built from wholly different cloths and one with some serious weighting issues. The bulk of the album is still pretty indebted to the debut but it’s the couple of off-curve serious moments - particularly the one-two punch of “Someone Great” and “All My Friends” - which steal the spotlight to such extent that the rest of the album is overshadowed in comparison.

Yet Sound of Silver still works, even if it’s not necessarily as immediate as the other LCD albums. The album may be the musical equivalent of throwing around things to which stick the most, but the songs that have made the cut are mostly composed of the band’s biggest classics. Ask any LCD fan for their top five songs and there’s a chance that Sound of Silver choices take up at least half of that list. Both “Someone Great” or “All My Friends” are frequently hailed as the band’s best song for a reason and it’s one piece of canon I have to agree with, because both the former’s synth melancholy and the latter’s ever-intensifying gut purge are giant songs that still seem personal to just you alone (the right answer is between the two is, of course, “All My Friends” - it’s one of the best songs of the decade, period). “North American Scum” is the archetypal example of a direct LCD rock song full of Murphy’s iconic wit, swagger and irony and it’s the best of its kind, the smokey fond farewell “New York I Love You…” has carved its own corner as the band’s single biggest tearjerker (especially after having become the set closer of their “last” concert) and the irresistable “Get Innocuous!” is the most grooving piece of music in the band’s repertoire with its Kraftwerk-bass and snappy rhythm. You could easily make an argument for “Us v Them” to belong on that list too: Murphy and co have always loved their long, tight jams that ebb and flow around a central groove, and “Us v Them” is a great, superbly fun example of that.

With that, you’ve got over half the album listed there, and each of those songs is genuinely an important part of the band’s history and legacy. It doesn’t matter if everything is a little all over the place when each of those songs are among the band’s most important and vital statements.

If it weren’t for the three other songs, I too would probably argue for this being the band’s best record. Not to slight on the songs given all three are thoroughly good, but they’re just completely overshadowed by everything else. “Watch the Tapes” and “Time to Get Away” are fun shorter cuts and the title track’s slowly enveloping mood manages to hit a particular soft spot in me, but all of them feel underwhelming in the company they’re in, and for most parts the other songs already do what they do, just better. On an album full of essentials they feel borderline unnecessary in comparison, a group of hanger-ons and retreads that could probably impress more under another setting but here there’s a huge gap between them and the rest.

It doesn’t change the fact that Sound of Silver is pretty much the most essential LCD Soundsystem record. It’s not their best and it certainly isn’t the most consistent, but so many of Murphy’s very greatest can be found here that it is, in some ways, the definitive experience - or at the very least, an excellent definition of LCD Soundsystem’s sound and why the group originally known just for their irreverent indie floor-fillers turned out to make a far great impact.

Rating: 8/10