LCD Soundsystem
American Dream

I don't know how James Murphy can think he can fool us. I mean, it's all so obvious. What's that? That he's aging visibly, and with him, his artistic sensibility is also aging, now folded into the usual cliché of an old and melancholic hipster, ex-king of the nostalgic dancefloor but too edgy to give up his newyorker jerk and snobbish coolness.

To be honest, a strong sense of transience, of decay, is palpable in this 'american dream' fourth album under the name LCD Soundsystem. Time passes, energies wane, as do the hopes of seeing whatever "the American dream" is come true. Physical aging understandably becomes the source of countless reflections on what has passed and what will never come. And especially on what one is, so that the question arises spontaneously: what are LCD Soundsystem today? Mind you: not what they were in the golden era of indie rock (2005-2009, more or less), not what they will leave as a legacy, but what they are here and now. This is the question.

LCD Soundsystem, today, are a terrible band. There should not be blind gratitude (for what reason, then?) for what they were; we need to analyze their present. A present of a tired and sad band, struggling and awkward, forced to retreat into the banal and comfortable grounds immune to criticism: byrnian new-wave, post-punk, little indie-disco beats and synths (now vintage themselves), kraut obsessiveness. Oh, and of course, Murphy's singing like a wise and melancholic dad, with that air of a fake-crooner-accidentally-on-stage but well aware of his poses and image. I repeat: it's all tremendously sad and pathetic.

'oh baby' starts just as you'd expect an LCD album opener to be: dull, metallic percussion, progressively overlaid with others of a similar nature, until the entry of the same damn synthesizer, always scratched-smooth-earthy, stuff that after that triumph of 'Someone Great', I hoped would remain confined to that era, to ten years ago, when an intellectualized recovery of certain '80s stuff could still make sense. 'american dream' presents itself from the start as an absolutely out-of-date revisitation of a sound that already in 2005 sounded dangerously derivative: today the danger has become action, and it has materialized into a disaster, a trail of what was, swollen with plastic nostalgia and self-satisfaction.

Needless to say, the rest of the album definitively takes away any will to live. It’s incredibly depressing, like visiting a provincial museum in August just to escape the unbearable heat: a visit where, in short, you don't care about what you're seeing, you're just wandering like a zombie waiting to get out in the open and die under the sun. 'american dream' is like seeking refuge in the memory of those crappy pre-adolescent summers, where you couldn't do anything to escape the monotony. I don't see why retracing such feelings, annihilating every form of vitality. I could analyze piece by piece this disgrace of a record, but there's no need for me to tell you how much 'call the police' and 'american dream' (the song) are mediocre revamps of old LCD hits and how 'other voices' is a copy of Talking Heads' 'Remain In Light', just as there's no need for me to tell you that 'tonite' and 'black screen', in different tones, are equally interminable ball busters.

'american dream' is a jumble of terrible ideas, songs lacking inventiveness, capable only of wallowing in a compositional vision that in 2017 can no longer stand, in any way. Do you really need to see yourselves in the words of a depressed 47-year-old to give form to your discomfort? Do you need a voice so resigned to speak for you? I don't, dammit, but you do as you please!