Sound of silver

I bought a couple of new albums at the weekend. One was the Arctic Monkeys' new one, the followup to their enormous debut. Like the first record, this one is uneven. At its best -- Fluorescent adolescent, Do me a favour, 505 -- it's a perfect blend of urban poetry and guitar racket. At its worst -- This house is a circus, Teddy picker -- it's indulgent, samey-same Brit indie. And that's bad. The world simply doesn't need the Libertines or their many imitators.

But it does need LCD Soundsystem, whose Sound of Silver takes up the ball from his debut and hits it out of the park. The slightly gimmicky feel of LCD soundsystem -- by which I'm thinking of tracks such as Daft Punk is playing at my house and Disco infiltrator -- although it made for great, fun songs, didn't make for music with lasting impact. It's only really in evidence on North American scum, which is one of the weaker songs here, eclipsed by Someone great and All my friends, which show a new depth that takes this album that notch higher. Someone great is a lovely meditation on loss that had echoes of the Human League (which is no bad thing, because few have matched their brilliant pop) and All my friends an electronic Dandy Warhols-alike (albeit ten times better than anything they managed). James Murphy is renowned for his love of analog, and that's made him very much of his time, because of course, analog -- or "analogalike", you could say, given that most electropop groups will be using digital technology -- has become the plat du jour. It's rather as though someone noticed that even the simplest eighties electropop -- the League, OMD, Yazoo -- had a big sound.

Murphy does not indulge in too much of the punk rock that informed some of LCD soundsystem, which is a blessing, because although Movement is a decent track, he's just much better when he's leaning more to the new wave than the no wave. And Sound of silver is nothing if not a great new wave album. The production is too 2007 for this to have been made in 1981 but otherwise, ethos and feel point to the early eighties. And that's no bad thing. Music seemed to have possibilities then.

Nerds with big record collections will enjoy spotting the quotes and ideas in this record but those of us who just really love good pop music will recognise this for the diamond it is. Hey, it's begging for this signoff, so here it is: Sound of silver is pure gold. Bank it!

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:36 am