Anarchy in the discotheque

Sound Advice #1: 

LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver (2007)

There’s a particularly poignant moment in ‘Shut Up and Play the Hits’, the film documenting the build-up to and aftermath of LCD Soundsystem’s final live show in 2011, where James Murphy is shown alone in what appears to be a vast storage space filled with studio equipment and vintage instruments. A series of still photographs flashes across the screen, depicting crowds at concerts and, perhaps most importantly, Murphy and his bandmates captured in candid moments – at parties, backstage, relaxing. It’s almost as if Murphy’s life (well, as LCD Soundsystem frontman, anyway) is flashing before our very eyes.

The camera pans back to Murphy standing at the far side of the room. We can’t see exactly what he’s looking at, but he suddenly bursts into tears – the sort of crying that men do that sounds like stifled laughter, but the hand over the face is a dead giveaway, as is the heavy breathing. It’s a deeply personal moment as Murphy, who has appeared fairly nonchalant about the demise of his band up until this point, breaks down in front of us. It’s as if it’s just dawned on him exactly what it is that he’s walking away from.

LCD Soundsystem were an interesting proposition from the moment the first singles landed. Critics called it ‘disco-punk’ and, really, they weren’t wrong.  Think mirrorballs with some of the squares missing, crackling neon lights reflected in puddles inside sweaty basement clubs, dusty speaker stacks which could withstand nuclear attack and grimy nightclub toilets caked in 30 years’ worth of graffiti, revealing secrets like modern day hieroglyphics. Think Mark E Smith and David Byrne sitting at the back of a run-down Studio 54, sharing a joke and a drink. Think the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but with the benefit of hindsight.

If 2005’s self-titled debut showed LCD Soundsystem to be more than just chancers who got lucky with a few catchy singles then ‘Sound of Silver’ was confirmation that Murphy was truly on to something special here.

The first album, while great, felt more like a collection of tracks. By contrast, ‘Sound of Silver’ actually feels like a cohesive piece of work to be listened to and enjoyed in one sitting.

Seven-minute opener ‘Get Innocuous!’ builds up slowly but surely, from the gentle electronic brush beats to the driving, insistent bassline and synth stabs, while ‘Time To Get Away’ picks up the tempo with its Billie Jean-style beats and – yes – that familiar cowbell.

‘North American Scum’ pays homage to the Buzzcocks’ ‘Something’s Gone Wrong Again’, as Murphy, in his trademark just-woken-up drawl, sets the record straight on his group’s origins (“And for those of you who still think we’re from England – we’re not, no.”) and laments the New York authorities’ ever-tightening iron grip on his beloved city’s nightlife (“We can’t have parties like in Spain, where they go all night/Shut down in North America/Or like Berlin, where they go another night – alright!”).

The curiously euphoric ‘Someone Great’, with its throbbing, distorted synths, could be the greatest song the Human League never made, while ‘All My Friends’ starts with a single, repeated piano riff which gradually builds into a full-blown masterpiece which sits somewhere between Krautrock (the Motorik drumming is all present and correct) and Joy Division. Murphy sings about growing older, reflecting on your life and realising that even though all your friends have also moved on, it would be great to see them all just one more time, to catch that last fleeting glimmer of youthful exuberance before it fizzles out completely.

We head back into cowbell disco territory (but it’s what they do so well) for ‘Us V Them’, with its Talking Heads-esque chorus and Nile Rodgers-style instrumentation and hypnotic “Us and them… over and over again” refrain. This is the point in the night when you feel cool drops of water landing on your head and look up to see the club’s ceiling glistening with condensation, the falling droplets sparkling like diamonds caught in the strobe lights. No time to stop and take a breather. Gotta keep dancing in the disco rain.

‘Watch the Tapes’ is where The Fall’s influence truly manifests itself in all its shouty, ragged glory. This is also the shortest track on the album, at just under four minutes, and beautifully throwaway too. The album’s title track picks up where ‘Us V Them’ left off and while the lyrics themselves border on cringeworthy (Google ‘em), musically ‘Sound of Silver’ is a sleek, brooding blend of disco, house and techno that wouldn’t have sounded out of place somewhere like The Hacienda. There’s even a proper hands-in-the-air breakdown. If you don’t get lost in it then you’re not listening properly.

Closing the album is the brilliantly-named ‘New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down’ is Murphy gazing out over the Big Apple cityscape at 5am, after a heavy night out, and realising that, for all its faults, no other place will do at this very point in time. I like to think he afforded himself a wry smile after closing the piano lid. As he heads to bed, a long-finished record is still spinning on a dusty turntable, the needle swaying to and fro in the run-out groove, the gentle pops and crackles creating reassuring white noise.

So, a remarkable record, but, as we know, all good things must come to an end. In LCD Soundsystem’s case, that seems to have come at a point when many felt they were just getting going, just as the records were getting more ambitious, the concert venues grander. They had another two or three albums left in them, surely?

Nope. After one more album (2010’s universally acclaimed ‘This Is Happening’), the band called it a day with one last concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden on April 2, 2011.

Is that really it? For now – yes. Better to go out on a high than to continue for the sake of it and risk becoming a self-parody, dragging out the same tired routine three decades later, right? S’pose so.

But if Murphy DOES decide to revive LCD Soundsystem in the near or distant future then I’d like to think it won’t just be for the money – it’ll be because he remembers that moment, in that storage room after that final gig, when he broke down in tears. When he remembers exactly what it is he walked away from.

Hip Hop Hump Days #8: DJ Shadow – Endtroducing (1996)

A common criticism levelled at DJs is that they’re essentially just playing music someone else has made.

Big deal. Some people choose to express themselves creatively via a set of turntables instead of picking up a guitar. No one’s pretending to be Jimmy Page here.

DJ Shadow has taken this concept one step further by using someone else’s music to make music of his own. And by that, I don’t mean he’s just lifted a familiar old vocal sample and stuck it over a drum machine and then tried to pass it off as his own.

Nope. He’s dug deep in the dusty crates of record shops, thrift stores and garage sales to find the elements that make up almost the entirety of ‘Endtroducing’. Drums, pianos, strings, guitars, basslines, snatches of dialogue… they’ve all been painstakingly extracted from these forgotten slabs of vinyl and then looped, manipulated or generally reconstructed to create something completely different.

The result is one of the most ground-breaking, cinematic-sounding examples of instrumental hip hop you will ever encounter. ‘Endtroducing’ is a record that many have tried to emulate (even Shadow himself has struggled to match it) but no one has yet come close to capturing its widescreen atmosphere and creative genius.

Opening with ‘Best Foot Forward’, a 48-second sound collage of hip hop samples, the album takes a decidedly eerie turn almost from the word go with second track (and arguable highlight) ‘Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt’ conjuring up images of being chased through an endless, rapidly darkening forest by an unseen force, soundtracked by an emotive piano loop, slightly sinister female choir and interview snippets.

Shadow’s penchant for cutting up and then painstakingly rebuilding beats is evident throughout, particularly on ‘Stem/Long Stem’, where industrial machine-gun drums tear mercilessly through gentle strings and harp, and ‘The Number Song’, in which percussion becomes the lead instrument. On ‘Napalm Brain-Scatter Brain’, drums slowed down to a dreamlike pace evolve into sprawling jungle-style rhythms which, in turn, give way to mellow strings and delicately plucked guitar: the calm AFTER the storm, if you will.

As complex as this may sound on paper, Shadow’s method appears to be taking a relatively simple idea and then gradually adding layers of colour and texture as the track progresses. For example, ‘Organ Donor’ (for the definitive version of this track, check out the ‘Pre-Emptive Strike’ compilation) revolves around a hypnotic two-finger organ riff punctuated by a subtle, vibrating bassline and an unashamedly funky drummer. ‘Midnight In A Perfect World’ is based around a synth loop sampled from Pekka Pohjola’s ‘The Madness Subsides’, seasoned with haunting hints of piano from David Axelrod’s ‘The Human Abstract’ and multi-layered drums, while seemingly disembodied female vocals fade in and out across the airwaves.

The album is broken up with little interludes which, while considerably shorter than the full tracks, are no less atmospheric. ‘Transmission 1’, ‘Transmission 2’ and ‘Transmission 3’ are particularly disturbing, sounding like distress signals from hell transmitted through a detuned radio (in fact, they sample dialogue and effects from the film ‘Prince of Darkness’). ‘Transmission 3’, which rounds off the album, also borrows the familiar and equally unsettling “It is happening again” line spoken by the giant in Twin Peaks during one of Agent Cooper’s visions. There are warmer moments too, such as ‘Why Hip Hop Sucks In ‘96’, a G-funk workout lasting less than a minute which ends with a knowing voice exclaiming “it’s the money” (see what he did there?), and an untitled track in which an unidentified man talks about a girl having eyes “as big as Jolly Ranchers” over a laidback blues-funk background.

‘Endtroducing’ demonstrated that a hip hop record didn’t need to rely on vocals – it was about the attitude, the ideas and the method (2006’s bitterly disappointing ‘The Outsider’ was widely criticised for focusing too heavily on guest vocalists and relegating the music to second place).

However, while forward-thinking in its approach and realisation, ‘Endtroducing’ also serves as something of a history lesson, going full circle to recapture hip hop’s formative years in the early to mid-70s, when DJs such as Kool Herc would play just the percussion elements of records, missing out the vocals, to create something new – even going as far as to buy two copies of a record so that he could stretch out those breaks. As Herc stood behind the turntables at those parties in the Bronx 40 years ago, he couldn’t possibly have envisaged that his sonic experiments would go on to inspire a global movement which, in turn, would give birth to one of the most important albums of the 90s.

‘Endtroducing’ continues this proud legacy. Those dusty junk shop records are the orchestra and DJ Shadow is composer and conductor combined. Encore.

Hip Hop Hump Days #7: The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy – Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury (1992)

Listening back to ‘Hypocrisy is the Great Luxury’, it strikes me that this record is something of a paradox: it sounded way ahead of its time in 1992 and yet it’s almost impossible to imagine it being released in any other year.

For those unfamiliar with the Disposable Heroes, they were a Bay Area duo comprising frontman Michael Franti and multi-instrumentalist Rono Tse, both of whom had served as members of The Beatnigs, an “avant-garde industrial jazz poets collective” (which sounds terrific, frankly).

To call it conscious hip hop doesn’t even scratch the surface. Sure, themes such as politics, money and social injustice are present and correct, but when the album’s opening line is “In the 1970s, the OPEC nations began to dominate the world’s oil economy”, you know it isn’t aimed at people who think the height of hip hop sophistication is bouncing down the street in a lowrider whilst wearing giant gold dollar signs round your neck.

From a strictly musical perspective, you could describe it as industrial hip hop – and indeed, the duo probably found greater acceptance in alternative rock circles (they had opened for the likes of Nirvana and Rage Against The Machine) than in the West Coast hip hop community, which was more focused on the warmer G-Funk sound being pushed by the likes of Dr Dre.

Franti’s upfront, confrontational-yet-calm vocal style often placed greater emphasis on getting the message across than it did on rhythm or flow – and he had plenty to say. Subjects covered across the album’s 13 tracks included anger at African-Americans ‘selling out’ to The Man (‘Famous and Dandy [Like Amos ‘N’ Andy]’), media bias and the subsequent dumbing down of society (‘Television, The Drug of the Nation’), racial equality (‘Socio-Genetic Experiment’) and – at a time when it was unthinkable for a hip hop artist to speak out against it – homophobia (‘Language of Violence’).

This isn’t an easy listen by any stretch of the imagination – in fact, Franti’s brutal yet intelligent lyrics (helpfully reproduced in the sleeve notes) probably played no small part in alienating any potential mainstream hip hop audience they may have had. Not that Franti and Tse would have cared anyway – they weren’t there to fit any formula, as evidenced by the inclusion of a cover of Dead Kennedys’ ‘California Uber Alles’ (albeit with slightly amended lyrics).

‘Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury’ was the duo’s only proper album. Following a spoken-word collaboration with beat author William S Burroughs (‘Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales’) in 1993, they decided to follow their own individual paths, with Franti going on to form the more accessible but no less socially aware Spearhead. 

But 23 years on, this album still stands up as an astonishingly raw snapshot of the USA in the early 90s, as seen through the eyes of a man who has woken up from the American Dream to find the Star-Spangled Banner soaked in blood and oil.