Sound of Silver is near perfection

By Jordan Sargent

Published March 16, 2007

With Sound of Silver, James Murphy has created both the best LCD Soundsystem album and the album of the year to date. Not only is it a sonice leap forward, but he again pushes the limits of dance-punk to it's breaking point. Sound of Silver is simply another combustible batch of snarky, devastating and forward-thinking dance music — definitely nothing less and sometimes even more.

In that sense, the album is almost predictable in its greatness. Besides the fact that Murphy is responsible for some of the best contemporary dance around (Hot Chip, The Rapture), he's hitting about .900 for his career as far his own work with both LCD and his DFA side-project. Anything less than what we've got in this snarling gem of an album wouldn't have just been a disappointment, it would have been a Hiroshima-sized bombshell.

What makes Sound of Silver ultimately better than its predecessor is that it's both more consistent and succinct. Murphy draws from the same places as he did on his debut — disco, house, techno, punk, lounge ballads — and comes up with an album that sounds both completely cohesive but also daring within itself.

He sounds less despondent, less desperate and less angry here than he did on the debut, but his words sting with no less poison. The most obvious example of this is single "North American Scum," a patriotic anthem as only Murphy could deliver it. It follows in the footsteps of "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" in both sonics and demeanor as Murphy deadpans, coos and tosses off insults he probably wrote down on a napkin somewhere. But it's impossible not to take pride in a song by a guy who is basically saying, "fuck you," to places where he's unmistakably bigger by identifying himself as "North American scum."

The absolute highlight, though, is "All My Friends," which is an Anthem (capital A) of epic proportions. It's a stage for Murphy built solely on a three-note piano riff and ratting hi-hats for a good 7 1/2 minutes, and he uses it to speak to aging hipsters getting pushed out by younger kids and the post-collegiate crowd who are just about to hit that proverbial crisis. Nothing I'm going to say is going to accurately portray how incredibly transcendent this song is, but for what it's worth, no line has hit me harder this year than, "You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan/ And the next five years trying to be with your friends again."

Not to break a record for hyperbole here, but if you care at all about what music means to you, you'll obtain this via any means necessary. It's the most melodic, danceable, weighty, effortless and hooky album I've heard this year. It's indispensable dance-and-headphones music spat directly into your face by one of the understated geniuses of this decade. It isn't the sound of silver, it's the sound of near perfection.