I know, I know, is this LCD Soundsystem week or what? Two songs... in a row? Am I crazy? It's just that I've been listening to nothing but them for the last three days, so I figure it's only fair that I stick to what I'm doing. At least I have something to write about.

For the last couple months (since October, I think, so we're nearing a year now I suppose) I've been playing around with making music using various software suites. I'll insist I am fairly rhythm-less, and I never learned to play an instrument despite being on my third guitar in my life so far. In my youth, if I couldn't dissect it and learn how to be awesome at it pretty quickly I'd get bored, which is funny because the excuses everyone made for me at school was that I wasn't being challenged enough. I wonder what that's about.

These days I try to learn things kind of the same way, without the giving up part. With unicycling and freeline skating it was all about learning what things should feel like and then just drilling that for hours at a time until I got it. Computers and HTML and it's ilk, it's all stuff I slowly taught myself by doing it over the years.

So when it comes to things that are more about feeling, more about just instinctively knowing what's right, like music (and relationships, and life in general), I'm pretty much entirely in the dark. I've been looking for the "trick" to making music, that makes music sound good and not like flat monotone bullshit, and as far as I can tell there either isn't one, or the trick is actually composed of about five hundred other tricks.

Again, in truth I started this knowing absolutely nothing about music creation. I didn't even really know what keys were or how they apply to music (and I'm still confused: should every instrument start on the root note of the chord you're in for each measure? does it not matter what notes other instruments play, or should they all be within the key? is that what "in key" means? oh, lord). I still don't know how The Beatles turned I - IV - V into songs.

Obviously a lot of this would be helped by, say, tackling guitar earnestly and learning a song or two. Or maybe I could just, say, take a class and get it over with, but I'm really, really stubborn. I feel like if I don't just figure it out on my own I'll deprive myself of the real "Eureka!" moments when they come around, of which I had one last night when I started improvising vocals over the noodling I had going on in iSequence and suddenly the whole thing started to sound more like a song.

LCD Soundsystem has been especially inspirational. A song like "Tribulations" takes my breath away. I'm sure I've listened to it on repeat several times now. I'm generally just floored by LCD Soundsystem's ability to take a relatively simple sounding beat and make it so subtly exciting that it can carry a whole song into and past the 6 minute mark. If you listen to this instrumental version of "Tribulations" after hearing the original, something becomes pretty obvious...

It's not really a song without the vocal. It's got different instruments that come in from time to time to play other instruments (the only signifier of the chorus is that little dingy synth guitar thing, which is interesting since most things you read on the internet say you should change up the beat a bit, throw some cymbals for power and speed in there, open up the hi hats, but Murphy does none of that on this track) but for the most part the song is just one long repetitive beat with a bouncy fuzzy bass line (until the guitar riff breaks in, that is).

But I can make beats in iSequence or Ableton Live that should sound just like this, but they don't, so what is it? What am I missing? Is it really just the flare? Should I tap my hi hats back a little bit, and throw in ghost notes on every snare and kick drum hit? Is that what makes Murphy's programmed beats so exciting, or is it because he programs them, plays them live, then reprograms them again? What's the secret to that bass line? It hits high every third sixteenth if I'm hearing right (and I can't keep time) and low on the kicks. How is it that something that sounds simple (peak valley peak valley peak valley) be so catchy?

Is it the chords that it's playing? What are they? B, F#(Gb), D, A, A#(Bb). What the fuck is that? I'm trying to match it up with anything I know about normal chord progressions and that shit, it is not in there. But it sounds good. It has awesome forward movement. It carries the entire song without the vocal, so it has to.

But that's really the trick to the entire song: the vocal. While "Tribulations" in instrumental form sounds interesting enough, it's not really a song you'd want to listen to. You can tap your foot to it, and probably dance to it if necessary, but it doesn't start to actually affect you until Murphy comes in with the melody in his vocal.

So, what's the secret then? Don't know yet. Seems to me that you find a chord progression that doesn't sound like balls. Then you figure out how to build it over a beat without destroying the beat (pretty simple, really, if you can even compose a decent sounding beat). If you're lucky your chord changes are carried by your bass line, but if it's not you have to come up with a bass line (which is really hard if you don't know how to play bass and don't have any instinctual clue as to how basses should sound). After this you have options: come up with a vocal (scary! but with good chord changes it should come pretty easy because it should just make you want to sing something) or figure out what frequencies you can fill up with other instruments without distracting from the other instruments.

But yeah, that's it, that's the trick. So why haven't I been like "OMFG I just wrote this amazing song!"? Because there is no trick to knowing what sounds good, even years of listening to music hasn't given me an understanding of the nuances of basses and the proper way to program pianos so they sound natural, as if a human is playing them. In truth, I wonder if it's easier to just program something, learn to play it, and then rerecord it so it sounds naturally. I have the sneaking suspicion a lot of artists do this.

As I progress in my attempt to dissect the secret to making good music, I'll do posts like this from time to time. I'll be stuck on this whole "trying to divine LCD Soundsystem's secrets" thing for a while I think.

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...