LCD Soundsystem

What can James Murphy do? What can he do, still living in Brooklyn while the cool kids in Paris and London with names like Justice and Simian Mobile Disco flood the clubs and blogs with a new brand of dance? What can he do after even he’s admitted that he’s losing his edge?

His answer is this: lead electro-posse LCD Soundsystem back into the DFA studios and make “Sound of Silver.” As good as the group’s eponymous debut was—and it was quite good, a stunning bricolage of everything danceable from the past three decades—it wasn’t adequate preparation for the band’s newfound nuance, or their emotional breadth.

In retrospect, it’s easier to see LCD’s first release for what it was: a little lazy and a bit too cute. The double-album format was an excuse to reissue Murphy’s DFA singles on the second disc, and the first frontloaded the fun, partying a bit too hearty with the opening cuts. Any attempts at sentiment felt artificial.

What a difference two years have made. Murphy’s always known how to build a song, but here, every track climbs slowly to its inevitable peak.

When the two titular words of opener “Get Innocuous” make their sole appearance in the song, it’s an ineffably perfect capstone to seven minutes’ worth of laser-synth disco.

Most surprising is Murphy’s lyrical depth. “Sound of Silver” contains actual story-telling, as on the searing “Someone Great” or “New York I Love You,” a heart-broken ode to a changed Big Apple.

Murphy wonders whether it even exists anymore, letting loose crushing one-liners: “New York I love you, but you’re wasting my time / Our records all show you were filthy but fine.”

Then there’s “All My Friends,” early frontrunner for song of the year. Freight train piano chords, a galloping bass, and Murphy belting out, “Where are your friends tonight?” Sonically, it’s New Order’s “Age of Consent” on HGH; lyrically, it’s something completely new. Objectively, it’s amazing.

The singles get wisely buried in the mix. Cowbell-heavy “Us v. Them” ends up near the album’s end; but while the sequencing shows restraint, the song’s bombastic multi-tracked vocal harmonies suggest that Murphy may even be taking on Freddie Mercury.

“North American Scum” is this outing’s silly bootyshaker, the equivalent of yesteryear’s “Daft Punk Is Playing at my House”—but that song’s teenagers have matured into musicians on an uncool continent, jabbing back at the accented discotheque acolytes across the Atlantic.

Which is funny, since Murphy owes a lot to European influences. They pop up everywhere: The Human League, Neu!, Bowie—the list goes on, and Murphy keeps self-consciously adding to it. But what else can he do? These are the albums he owns; it’s the music he likes; and making more of it is what he does best.

So all Murphy can do is wake up in the morning and turn that hangover throb into a disco pulse that will sustain another party, lead to another painful sunrise, and give everyone some more anthems.

“We do what we’re programmed to do,” Murphy says simply on “Watch the Tapes.” Which was the answer all along.

—Reviewer Jake G. Cohen can be reached at jgcohen@fas.harvard.edu.