LCD Soundsystem – 10 of the best

1. Losing My Edge

“I’m losing my edge / the kids are coming up from behind,” half-mutters James Murphy, for the opening lyrics of the first track he released as LCD Soundsystem. Over the next four minutes he both predicted the shape of his own career and deflected many of the criticisms that might be levelled at it; that he’s a middle-aged hipster with an overstuffed record bag into which he’s only too happy to dive. He’s admitting every charge against him, but qualifying his admission: “Don’t I have great taste?” Losing My Edge was released in 2002 on a wave of rising hype for Murphy. After co-producing David Holmes’ raw-sounding 2000 album Bow Down to the Exit Sign, he and former UNKLE member Tim Goldsworthy joined Jonathan Galkin in forming DFA Records, scoring an early, scuzzy hipster hit with the Rapture’s House of Jealous Lovers. Recorded with longstanding collaborator Nancy Whang and Spank Rock’s Alex Epton, Losing My Edge was meant to be a one-off, a reaction – as he told journalist John Doran at the time – to the fear he felt that being “the cool rock disco guy” would come to a crashing end. “It became a wider thing about people who grip on to other people’s creations like they are their own,” he said, reflecting on his own DJ career. “There is a lot of pathos in that character, though, because it’s born out of inadequacy and love.” The lyric begins amid comedy, as Murphy haughtily proclaims over a skipping drum machine beat that he was at every key moment in the birth of western underground music, and ends in distorted euphoria as he bellows a litany of his key influences, from Todd Terry to Joy Division and Sun Ra to “the Sonics! The Sonics! The Sonics! The Sonics!” It was some calling card.

2. Beat Connection

As if to prove Losing My Edge wasn’t just a one-off slice of winning introspection set to a good beat, this was on its B-side. And it’s something truly special, eight minutes of taut, dramatic, perfectly controlled build-up and breakdown, as Murphy fuses disco and punk rock in the manner for which DFA became famed. Dangling on the end of a layered, rhythmic intro that takes half the song’s running time to play out, it’s the sound of Murphy forcing club kids and indie wallflowers together on to the floor and making them dance. “Everybody here’s afraid of fun / And nobody’s getting any play / It’s the saddest night out in the USA,” he hollers, boiling down the itchy-footed insistence of (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang and the haranguing presence of Mark E Smith, filtered through the then fashionable disco-punk sound that he helped originate.

3. Yeah (Crass version)

Murphy was a suburban kid from New Jersey who dropped out of his English major at New York University. He turned down the chance to write for Seinfeld and spent his 20s in a rota of unmemorable alternative groups, hitting an early peak of debatable creativity in designing the PA arrangements for dimly remembered Sub Pop signees Six Finger Satellite. (His rig was named Death From Above, which went on to give his label its title.)It’s no wonder, then, that he had an array of songs ready when LCD Soundsystem started to take off. During the three-year wait between the first single and the debut album, the band released four EPs, all of which found their way on to that debut’s extra disc. Much like Beat Connection, Yeah (in its “Crass version”; the “Pretentious version” is a less frantic, more groove-laden thing) takes its own sweet time over its 10-minute duration, in no hurry to hit its peak of oscillating sequencers, feverishly hammered bongos, and Murphy and Whang’s drowsy repetition of the title’s key word. It’s the other track that bred LCD Soundsystem’s formidable reputation as a rock band for the clubs.

4. Daft Punk is Playing at My House

If the person in the street knows LCD Soundsystem, the chances are this is the first song they think of. In January 2005, the self-titled debut record arrived. A month later this track was released and the band moved out of the clubs, becoming as close to overground acclaim as they were ever likely to. This was their first UK top 40 single, one of only two. Having already boasted of being “the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids” on Losing My Edge, Murphy was back at the Parisian duo’s door the year before their famed “pyramid” set at Coachella provided EDM’s breakthrough moment in the US. The song was based on a vague and unrealised idea he had to film a Daft Punk concert in his house as though it were a big-budget live movie, and it was a rare example of an LCD Soundsystem track that relied on a developing lyrical story at its core. It also featured a bassline worthy of one of Barry Adamson’s from his Magazine days and a brave and entirely convincing falsetto from Murphy. “They’re a great signifier, because they manage to be genreless rather than something really specific,” he told Doran about Daft Punk at the time. “They do song-style songs and techno songs; they do dark stuff and pop crossovers. It’s like referring to David Bowie, who has been everything from folk to glam rock.” It’s important to note that every song here, and everything Murphy has recorded with LCD Soundsystem, bears roots of varying depths in Bowie’s work.

5. Freak Out/Starry Eyes

Given the task of picking 10 of the best from a concise career that never saw the group release a track that was less than pretty good (the debut album’s bleary, Beatles-lite Never as Tired as When I’m Waking Up comes closest to being a stinker), it’s tempting to pick 45:33 from 2006 on a technicality. Commissioned by Nike as a soundtrack to the perfect run and inspired by Ashra guitarist Manuel Gottsching’s extended, high-concept suite of Germanic electronics E2-E4 (1984), 45:33 was technically one track, which was nearly half a minute longer than the running time in the title. But a later CD issue revealed it was actually nine separate tracks and this diptych was later used as a B-side, so we’ll pick it out as the highlight. Mostly instrumental, with vocals used as sampled, rhythmic motifs, Freak Out/Starry Eyes demonstrates Murphy’s gift for selecting the most unlikely influential sources while infusing a track with his own gift for melody and pop hook creation. Built around an ambling but relentlessly hypnotic drumbeat and a breezily descending trumpet riff, the Freak Out section is pure Afrobeat. Starry Eyes, meanwhile, is a slice of synthpop owned by a sweetly strutting vocal from singer, actor and former Mickey Mouse Club performer Terra Deva – a fact that adds weight to the rumour that this was one of the tracks originally intended for fellow former Mouseketeer Britney Spears during Murphy’s aborted recording sessions with her.

6. North American Scum

The first flush of club-driven buzz that broke them on the dancefloors of Brooklyn and Europe having subsided, this was the big statement of LCD Soundsystem’s overground breakthrough album Sound of Silver, a comeback single that was both a thumbed nose and a love letter to their home nation. Released in 2007, so still inhaling the last diesel fumes of George Bush’s presidency, its title appeared to align itself with Eurocentric weariness at relentless displays of foreign policy muscle in the Middle East. Yet the song told a different story, primed with intent and a glistening, insistently repeated guitar riff over which Murphy and Whang positively yelped their glee at being American, warts and all. “I hate the feeling when you’re looking at me that way / Because we’re North Americans,” he hollers. “You see I love this place that I’ve grown to know / And yeah, I know you wouldn’t touch us with a 10-foot pole.” History proved him not unreasonable. “It was kind of amazing that people started treating America like it was a different country [when Obama was elected],” he told Clash magazine in 2010. “Like before, it was this backward, aggro, Bush country and now it’s this forward thinking, liberal country and you’re like, ‘It’s the same fucking place!’”

7. All My Friends

“I kind of vowed not to make personal music,” Murphy told the AV Club of the group’s earliest years. “You’re in a rock band singing about your life, your feelings. It seems pretty yawny in a lot of ways.” By Sound of Silver this edict was out of the window, contributing to All My Friends taking its place as possibly their masterpiece. Sonically it’s irresistible, a single, eager, excitable piano riff that careers through the song, joined in quick succession by a growling bassline and a serrated guitar riff that might have been played by Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner, then a Neu!-like synth wail. But it’s the lyrics that really make the thing: excited for the night ahead, nostalgic for heady times past in the face of encroaching middle age, and resonating with the power of great pop music to frame a time and grant the illusion of staving off mortality. “And if the sun comes up / And I still don’t wanna stagger home,” croons Murphy urgently, inspiring a hot sweat, “then it’s the memory of our betters / That are keeping us on our feet.” In 2013, Stereogum made it the subject of a feature entitled “Deconstructing LCD Soundsystem’s All My Friends and Trying to Define the Best Song of the Millennium” – which was over-eager, but it wasn’t hard to see where they were coming from.

8. One Touch

LCD Soundsystem are best remembered for the effect they had on the dancefloor, and for contributing significantly to breaking down that now hopelessly outdated sense that analogue and electronic instruments belonged on different stages and at different times of the evenings. The third and final (so far) album, This Is Happening (2010), didn’t display quite so much urgency in this regard, but where it did it demonstrated how Murphy’s edge remained defiantly unlost since that debut single of eight years before. Clocking in at nearly eight minutes and composed by Murphy, Whang and Gavin Russom, One Touch is an itchy-footed acid house monster, churning with mechanical grace and almost overwhelming disdain for the fact that the group weren’t megastars by this point: “There’s no way that we can be pleased with this / We’ve been waiting such a long time.”

9. New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down (live)

LCD Soundsystem are a New York band informed by the outsider’s perspective of New Jersey kid Murphy, a group steeped in the legends of Paradise Garage, of the no-wave scene and of Body and Soul house parties. They not only add to these legends themselves, but expand on them, documenting the early-21st-century push to fight back against the Giulianification of the city’s dancing laws and club landscape with the creation of a thriving underground scene in Brooklyn. This song, a Vegas-style crooner’s ballad to rank alongside Sinatra’s New York, New York, closed the second album Sound of Silver (2007), but this live version from their 2011 farewell concerts at Madison Square Garden and the subsequent live album The Long Goodbye is the definitive one – the end of an era for the band and for the city itself. While someone slowly plays the Twin Peaks theme in the background, Murphy expresses his thanks, bids his farewells and gets on with it. “It wasn’t everything I wanted it to be, of course,” he told the Village Voice in 2007 of moving to his adopted home city, “but it’s still better than everything else.”

10. Throw

LCD Soundsystem were skilled and thoughtful interpreters of others’ work, usually on B-sides, limited releases or the live stage; you don’t need to search hard to find a shoegazey take on Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Slowdive, a committed but oddly Americanised version of Joy Division’s No Love Lost, and recent tributes to Bowie and Prince at Coachella with “Heroes” and Controversy, respectively. However, the last track that the first incarnation of the group officially released – until the sweet but featherlight balladry of Christmas Will Break Your Heart heralded their comeback in December 2015 – was this cover of Carl Craig’s irresistible 1994 second wave Detroit techno beat, first issued by Craig under his Paperclip People alias. A near-instrumental precisely 10 minutes long, it maintained the irresistible, train-like momentum of the original and grafted on a winningly ludicrous falsetto from Murphy towards the finale. Released as a bonus track on This Is Happening, it was awarded the ultimate kudos when Craig reissued it on his own Planet E label, placing LCD Soundsystem among a catalogue that includes such fellow North American electronic visionaries as Moodymann and Kevin Saunderson.