Classics In The Making: LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver

A dance record for those who don’t like dance music.

In the 80s we had The Talking Heads and David Byrne, and in the 2000s we had LCD Soundsystem and James Murphy.  Murphy’s band blends together the beats of house music but is very faithful to the rock music he loves.  While rock and dance genres don’t normally go well together, Sound of Silver manages to create a sound that both dancers and rockers can move to.  It’s rock music you can dance to!

The album starts off slow with “Get Innocuous!”, and for about about two minutes it seems like the song is going nowhere.  Casual listeners might struggle to stay in the song, but if you wait long enough the vocals kick in, the drums kick harder, and the groove will enter your body and will not come out.  From there the album jumps around great tracks with lyrics of noticeable depth.  Murphy sings about loosing a dear friend (“Someone Great”), getting older and still trying to be cool (“All My Friends”), the love-hate relationship he has with his favorite city (“New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down”), and anything else cool people who live in New York talk about.

The most incredible thing about this album is that it’s meant to be listened to as an album – whole, uninterrupted, and revolving around a concept.  There are no weak tracks here, but listening to them individually out of order won’t sound as good as listening to the album from start to finish, a task that might be too much for the mp3 generation to handle.  The only possible exception is “All My Friends”, Murphy’s most accessible song and one of the best songs of the past decade.

So this is rare, in the age of downloading where the emphasis is on an individual track, that Murphy is putting emphasis on the whole thing, and he’s all the better for it.  This is proof that the album is not dead, not yet anyways.

Follow the link to watch a shortened (but still awesome!) video for “All My Friends.”

Classics In The Making: Ryan Adams – Heartbreaker

The greatest album Gram Parsons never made.

In its purist form, country music is not about how sexy a girl thinks your tractor is.  Country music is all about the heart, but not the achy breaky kind.  Country music is about the heart that is fragile, stubborn, and hard to heal, the kind that has been disappointed just one too many times, and the kind of heart that keeps beating while our minds try to make sense of everything.  So in that respect, Ryan Adams is essentially a country singer, for  nobody can sing about a broken heart better than he can, and no album displays his gift as well as 2000’s “Heartbreaker.”

The album, for the most part, is stripped down to just acoustic guitars, piano, and Adam’s withered harmonica and voice, singing of youth, bad love, and everything in-between.  From missing his home and family (“Oh My Sweet Carolina”), to a love turned sour (“Why Do They Leave?”), to the things he loves that are slowly killing him (“To Be The One”), Adams creates the perfect soundtrack for those nights of reflection on what could have been, what should have been, and what it all means.

The album is more folk than country, so those country-haters can ease up a bit.  But make no mistake, this is a country record, and a darn good one too.  There are no weak tracks on the entire record, and very few album are filled with the kind of emotion Adams is able to express.  This is an album for all of us who have ever felt alone, defeated, and heartbroken, which is all of us at certain times.  Adams continues to make more albums, some of them good and some of them alright, but this is easily his greatest moment.

Essential Tracks: “To Be Young”, “In My Time Of Need”, and “Oh My Sweet Carolina”