LCD Soundsystem's "Dance Yrself Clean"

My noble colleague Megan is wrapping up her thesis this week, so I'm afraid you, global audience, are stuck with just me for a little while. That means that OYL will quickly become ohyoungoverreportedindiemusic.blogspot.com. Yikes! Ms. Ronan will soon be back to bring a touch of class and diversity in subject matter, but for now -- hey, a song!

LCD Soundsystem's This is Happening will be released -- dropped, this is a dance record -- on May 17th (on DFA, which is now synonymous with Murphy's name) to universal acclaim and less hip-shaking than you might expect (but a lot of head-nodding and thoughts of hip-shaking, like "Hey, if I was going to shake my hips, I'd probably go left to right to achieve maximum velocity, and -- wait, where's my Pabst?"). The first track, "Dance Yrself Clean," went global last week, and now you can stream the whole album at LCD's naturally minimalist website.

"Dance Yrself Clean" is what we in the industry (the industry of blogging, in which OYL is something like Detroit) call a "jam." It is also, like "Get Innocuous," the first track on 2007's Sound of Silver, an exercise in how to turn slow-building head-bobbing into full-throttle, obscene movements of the waist. LCD head-honcho James Murphy lays down a minimal beat, replete with fuzzes of bass and a touch of cowbell, and his understated but newly confident vocals take the listener through what the listener wants James Murphy to take the listener through -- i.e., a day in the social life of Mr. Murphy himself. We get images of people "walking up to me expecting / walking up to me expecting words, / happens all the time."Could that be a reference to us, adoring fans that we are, bothering James at a club when he's just trying to wring that spot of Jay-Z's limited edition Diamond Filtered vodka out of his black skinny tie? (That vodka sounds delicious!) Or is he just talking about Aziz again?

The track also reminds us that James Murphy's still the funniest guy in indie music (send your apologies to Eddie Argos in Art Brut -- just kidding, no one remembers who that is!). As the song builds, Murphy reflects on a friend "talking like a jerk / except you are an actual jerk, / and living proof / that sometimes friends are mean." I know that guy! The moment's an instance of one of the stronger tools in Murphy's arsenal -- using humor and irony to make a song about the slight, sad isolation of life in your late 20s-early 30s ring true without a hint of sentimentality. At the three minute mark, he turns up the volume and the bass, and the track's title becomes a mantra of how to forget, for eight minutes or so, the self-indulgence of that post-grad ennui.

It's a moving (in regards to both heart and hips) piece of music, and I'm even willing to ignore the Kerouac-ian omission of the "ou" in the title (I'll believe it's Sonic Youth-ian, instead, and not a nod to the guy who ruined American prose, whoops!). It is not, of course, another "All My Friends." It couldn't be. The album stream reveals that no other track on This Is Happening quite reaches those heights. That's fine -- I'll let Murphy play these tracks back to back live, and then I'll nod my head with the rest of the crowd, saying, yeah, this is a guy worth following wherever he'll take us.

--Corey