Review Summary: Neither a masterwork nor original. This album is to music elitists what Neal Cassady was to the Beatniks. It’s a façade pretending to be profound, masking a hollow lack of talent, merit, or anything new worthy of its reverence.
Sound of Silver is the sophomore effort out of New York’s James Murphy’s side-project LCD Soundsystem. Like their debut, it is highly acclaimed but managed a modest commercial success off the strength of the album highlight All My Friends. It seems here that James managed to capture it all; the recognition, the fame and the money. A holy trifecta in commercial music, and more impressive as this is not expressly a commercial album.
Indeed, Sound of Silver pigeonholes itself in a bizarre place. Not quite techno, not quite dance, not quite indie, not quite pop. And outside of the incredible All My Friends, it just doesn’t work.
When thinking about the best way to articulate why I feel the album exists in the gulf between this critical acclaim (All My Friends was nominated in multiple publications as Song of the Year), commercial success and the poor quality I believe the record to be, I couldn’t help but think of Kerouac’s On The Road. All My Friends drew me to this metaphor with its lyrics “and if I’m made a fool on the road, there’s always this” and I believe they are twin souls of the same shallow pretentiousness, let me explain.
I first encountered Jack Kerouac’s On The Road house-sitting for the friends of my girlfriend at the time. It was a white picket fence house, unglamourous and simply adorned as they spent most of their money travelling. Since they owned a house and I didn’t, and spent more time travelling than I did, I held them on some kind of pedestal as more enlightened beings. They got something about the world that I didn’t. This was a simple illusion produced by my naivety. I know now, that like Jack Kerouac, they were simply the lucky beneficiaries of a middle class they didn’t deserve. Nepo-babies who couldn’t amount to anything, and painted over their deficiencies with stories, alcohol and drugs. On The Road was their bible, and it sat right in the middle of their rough-hewn, small bookcase. I would later learn they never read past the first few pages, so I can forgive them for their misgivings. But not for their façade.
Over the week that I took care of the house I dove into On The Road, excited at the prospect of finally getting to dig into the user’s guide of living a freer life. Beneath its accolades, gushing critical reviews and devoted fan dedications, what I found in On The Road is a tale of a talentless wastrel who never did a good thing for anyone, and his enabler who mistakes adjectives for moral justification. On The Road is proof that if you describe an act of cruel psychotic behaviour in religious prose, you can make the peons applaud it. Nothing happens in the book that is noteworthy. There is nothing they do which couldn’t be achieved by being much less terrible people, which is why On The Road desperately needs its mystifying religious tones. Without them, its just a tale of talentless, self-obsessed, narcistic nobodies. On The Road only appeals to people who don’t get it, contrary to popular opinion. The more it mystifies you with obviously self-contradicting gratuitous onanism the more likely you are to think it is profound. In a sense, you’re supposed to just read the critical praise of On The Road, and never consider the actual subject matter of the book itself, yourself.
This is how I feel about LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver. What we have here are a collection of songs guarded and elevated by critical praise, which makes me question if it weren’t for this praise, would we maybe come to a different opinion as to the subject matter we have on offer here? Like On The Road, it is a piece of art whose accolades and content are a façade hanging over an astonishing lack of accomplishment and merit. Are the vocals good or talented? No. Are the beats particularly ingenious, new or catchy? Outside of the stand-out track All My Friends – No. There’s one flash of brilliance, riddled with pretentious prose pining for…what? The days you spent partying? If blink-182 wrote a song about that we would call them sad and maladjusted for their age. This album feels to me like a contradiction. If you don’t get it, that means you have to vocalise that you do. And if you vocalise that you don’t get it, the people that don’t get it but pretend they do get it, will tell you that you don’t get it, and to get it, you have to pretend that you do.
But that’s not even the worst part. I can forgive the occasional stumble when striving for greatness or originality. But that’s not what is happening here. Track after track drags on, with one uninspired avant-garde beat hoarsely imitating music or melody after another, like a collection of experimental Yoko Ono tracks if she learnt how to use a synthesizer or play an instrument. It calls to my mind something I noticed about LCD Soundsystem’s debut album, also critically acclaimed. The most popular track Losing My Edge has James Murphy answering his critics who accuse him of “losing his edge”, not an adjective denoting musical prowess. His reply isn’t musical brilliance, it isn’t an earworm or a hook, it’s a repeated set of refrains about where he was when other things were happening. Those are his bona fides. Like On The Road, his claim to his accolades isn’t his achievements, it isn’t mastery of his craft, it’s just a claim to have partied and being drunk at a host of different locations that are important to other people. Big deal. And this is what I think the critics and James Murphy himself obviously miss. The music actually has to at least sound good, or be catchy, if it isn’t going to be an artistic display of accomplishment. Otherwise, we can call your bluff.
I can see Neal Cassady, drugged out of his mind listening to Allen Ginsberg speak the lyrics of All My Friends, revelling in the symbolic pretentiousness of it all before leaving another pregnant lover to go steal money from someone to fuel another destructive adventure. The point of pretentiousness after all, is that it gives those without substance something to pretend to be. Sound of Silver doesn’t sound like silver at all, it sounds like music for people who need dance music to pretend to be more than it is, so they can pretend to be more than they are.
Is this a masterpiece? No. Sound of Silver is a symbol to rally around, a flag, a standard for people who don’t listen to music because they like music, but pretend to listen to this album and like it so they can acquire social currency. You don’t like Sound of Silver, admit it. You like All My Friends. It’s a great song, on a very poor album. To bring home my justification of my rating, let’s consider the highpoint of the album. Is it catchy? Yes. Is it musically impressive? No. The song consists of a single beat, with lyrics designed to be mystifying to disguise the rather embarrassing content. A man too old to miss partying, reminiscing about the times he went partying.
The rest of the songs are also monotones, but proving that lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice, James Murphy’s lightning in a bottle is restricted to one track. The monotones of this album are the equivalent of the monotones of the asphalt of the road. It goes on and on unchanging in texture and devoid of colour and eventually, when the road ends, you’re happy to be off it and at your destination. The album clicks off, and another clicks on. You sigh, thankful that its over, and move on to more enjoyable things.
Jack Kerouac died at 47, so at 45 turns you’d hope you would have more to show for yourself as a musician than reminiscing about bygone parties to single-note beats. Yeh man, I know about Nation of Ulysses. You don’t get any points for being able to name-drop them, and neither does your music. Because they suck too.
