LCD soundsystem- this is happening

LCD Soundsystem

This Is Happening

[Virgin / Parlophone / DFA]

Buy on Amazon MP3
Anticipated both by James Murphy's proclamations that this might be the final LCD Soundsystem album and by teasing videos of the band holed up in Rick Rubin's L.A. mansion, clad all in white, This Is Happening could only have been an event. And the album, like the title, delivers without a moment's hesitation: What could have been the document of a band fighting for its place in the pecking order turns out to be something far more personal and far more important. This Is Happening doesn't just keep step with the times; it's the portrait of an older, wiser Murphy, arch and guarded in equal measure, who's intent upon keeping two steps ahead of himself, never mind the competition.
However you want to process Murphy's biography and the whole New York rock backstory, the music on the album more than carries its own weight, interpolating Bowie and Eno's studio aura through several generations of downtown dance-rock and canonical house in a way that seems genuinely new; with This Is Happening, the "DFA sound" becomes less about its influences than Murphy's own worldview, as Murphy quits leaning on funk-punk clichés and makes every song count. Listen back to Sound of Silver, and a song like "Time to Get Away" sounds like filler, a way for Murphy to find his voice and bide the time-- at least, compared to "Pow Pow" and "Home", the only tracks on the new album that have any truck with old-school DFA-style funk at all.
Maybe what Murphy learned the most from Eno and Bowie is the importance of melody. On the last album, "You Wanted a Hit" would have been a jarring punk-funk thing, but here it's smoothed out and sadded up by a single, demure keyboard line; same goes for "Pow Pow", which starts with rote congas, stubby bass, and spoken ranting, and eventually blossoms into something gloriously harmonic and yearning. As on the last album, there's a careful balance between rockers and brooders, but even the more straightforward club jams, like "One Touch", are darker and more urgent than before. And if follow-ups to "Someone Great" and "All My Friends" are missed, "All I Want" and "I Can Change" offer potent emotional mile-markers for Murphy's state of being in 2010-- just one point in a line that he's clearly not tired of filling in. ("Never change," his ass.) --Philip Sherburne