Years ago when the BLAH BLAH BLAH started about LCD Soundsystem I turned my nose up in the air. "Dance music, you say?" I cried, while putting in my monocle and stick---one in my eye, one in my ass, never to get mixed up thankfully. "Dance music? Only unsophisticunts listen to dance music! Harrumph!"

So, that is to say, prior to This Is Happening, I never got into LCD Soundsystem. I listened to "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" but all it sounded like to me was a repetitive beat and some guy going "Daft Punk is playing at my house... my house!" in various ways. I didn't get it, and if I listened past it I probably really didn't get it. I come to you as someone unfamiliar with LCD Soundsystem, where This Is Happening is officially my first real listen to them.

And I totally dig it.

While I went through a Bowie phase when I was seventeen, I guess my familiarity isn't very strong because I don't get the David Bowie comparisons, but then again when someone says "Bowie's Berlin triptych" I also have no fucking clue what they're talking about, so I guess I'm just unqualified to comment on that. What I will say, though, is that if you're listening to this album from the other room a couple things come to mind:

1. What year of the 80's did this come from?

2. How do the Talking Heads feel about influencing an album that has obviously time traveled?

If anything I have to give this Murphy guy a lot of credit. At work I'm hounded all day with JackFM, so I get to hear every single popular 80's song at least twice a week, and sometimes I find myself wondering what really separates 80's music from today. Synthesizers are still alive and well, though they don't dominate most music like they did back then (except in the case of Yeasayer, the only band who seems to actually want to use synthesized drums, as unfortunately as it is), so it can't be the synthesizers.

The mix, while not low-fi compared to back then, always has a certain feel to it. You can feel the 80's in certain songs that don't even use the main-stays, but even that might not really be the whole story. Then I tried to think of bands I was familiar with who really evoked the 80's, and one of the few that really does is Yeasayer. So what makes Yeasayer sound like the 80's?

The vocals. It's the 80's vocal. David Byrne, Andy Partridge, Thomas Dolby, Danny Elfman, whoever the hell is in The Human League, they all have this distinct way of singing (in the era, at least), where it sounds like their voices are rubber bands that are bouncing around the inside of the song and they're just about to snap and take out someone's eye. Maybe Bowie started it in the 70's, I don't know, but I do know this: the trick to sounding like the 80's is to sing like it. The rest falls in line.

So, LCD Soundsystem is the first band I've encountered that 100% brings the sound of the 1980's forward. The only thing missing is the shitty mix that sounds like each instrument was recorded on cassette tape. Synthesizers, sing-speak, ADHD-Gene Vincent vocals, and dance beats, it's all here, and it's pretty much totally awesome.

Also, as a side note, it's pretty significant that every song but one on this album is nearly six minutes or over six minutes, and the songs never get boring or repetitive. The song-craft on this album is pretty damn impressive if only for that reason alone. I can only dream of one day making music that sounds this awesome.

I'll be sitting in the middle of the Hollywood Bowl come October 15th seeing Sleigh Bells, Hot Chip, and LCD Soundsystem. I impulse bought the tickets yesterday after falling in love with this album. Big sigh...