Album: LCD Soundsystem

LCD Soundsystem, EMI/DFA

Rock critics love LCD: check the extent to which most of them are over-praising this album, a middling affair that in no sense supports its weighty garlands. It is easy to see why they like LCD, aka the New York producer/ label head James Murphy: it's traceable to last year's so-hip-it-hurts single "Losing My Edge", a name-dropping dancefloor stomper in which Murphy claimed to have been present at every pivotal cool moment in rock history, including some before he was born. It constituted a validation of the critics' typically outré, eclectic taste. Critics often analyse new music according to a complex matrix of influences, and with LCD Soundsystem, Murphy seems to be creating it in similar fashion. The hip referentiality of "Losing My Edge" continues in the opening track, "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House", which borrows the French duo's buzzy synth tones and mindless repetition. Elsewhere, there are stylistic references to the Euro-disco of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder ("Disco Infiltrator"), the seedy electro-throb of Suicide ("Thrills"), and even nods to The Beatles and Pink Floyd in "Never as Tired as When I'm Waking Up". But apart from the lovely, reflective "Great Release", an exercise in Eno-esque sparseness, the results seem laboured and overdone.