After the perfectly on-point early salvo of ‘Losing My Edge’, everything that’s emerged from James Murphy under the LCD banner has, to some extent, been a working out, or working through, of the implications of the lines ‘I’m losing my edge/but I was there.” But American Dream aka “Look what David Bowie made me do!” (according to Murphy, Bowie helped convince him that he should make another LCD Soundsystem album) seems particularly fraught with these questions; do the attitudes and behaviours you clung to so urgently when you were younger, that you felt could or should define you, still matter? What’s left if you let go of the glory days? Rather as with his decision to break up the band and then reform, sparking the ire of some fans, the answer is to try to have your cake and eat it; make like you accept your party’s over while still talking up how good the parties were in your day.
Musically, this manifests itself on American Dream in familiar ways, through canny refinement and recombination of moves lifted from Murphy’s heroes – the guitar on ‘Other Voices’ is so reminiscent of Bowie collaborator Robert Fripp that I had to check the credits, while ‘I Used To’ is pure Talking Heads/Eno circa ‘Before And After Science’. Vocally, Murphy mutates as required, even delivering a passable Ian McCulloch/Bono imitation on ‘How Do You Sleep?’
The title track has little to do with the state of the US politics. It’s personal again, and the most elegiac LCD song to date. “You took acid and looked in the mirror… the revolution was here that set you free, from those bourgeoisie”. Murphy’s too good a producer for American Dream to lack punch and momentum, but the most affecting thing about it is this spectacle of James Murphy - or someone who closely resembles him – crooning and spinning favourite records at the wake of his own youth.
American Dream by LCD Soundsystem is out tomorrow (1 September)
