When "Losing My Edge" finally climaxes into James Murphy's soliloquyal duet, a list of groups that reads like a guide to the hipster canon, it's difficult to tell if it's a natural continuation of the caricature the song is spearing or if at that point Murphy is speaking as himself, spitting back into the face of every elitist snob the sum of his own musical knowledge. If the former, then irony supposedly once again excuses Murphy's excesses and willingness to parody others. The latter, then he's every bit the hipster he tries to take down a notch. Even if Murphy is more self-aware than his songs generally imply and his sarcasm is so total as to include himself, the muddiness of his satire is once again a central problem to this, his sophomore album under the LCD Soundsystem moniker, Sound of Silver.

The album ends up somewhere between the best of the world of DJing and the world of traditional songwriting. Torn between being the faceless DJ obscured by the sampled voices of 'legitimate songwriters' and being the songwriter himself, often the best Murphy can muster is emulation or, at his worst, cynical, empty sarcasm. At some point endless irony should no longer be a stand-in for substance, and Murphy is also still writing from a personal enough place that he keeps LCD from the appeal of his DFA remixes, which are 'only' supposed to be fun to dance to. Sometimes it seems like Murphy is writing lyrics with the same mentality as Vice Magazine does its Dos and Don'ts: free to perpetuate whatever tasteless, hypocritical, arbitrary judgments they like so long as they're appended with a wink. Mimicking and mocking and rolling eyes at both sides of any debate, The Sound of Silver is the neo-disco equivalent of Team America: World Police, thinking itself above having a stance but still content to poke fingers at those who do. It's entertaining, sure, but also empty and a bit soulless.

Like first single "North American Scum," which treads where only Ted Leo's "Ballad of the Sin Eater" once dared: while traveling abroad (read: Europe), the hated American awakens to his reviled status. Murphy sings, "We've been on trains and on planes 'till we think we might die / far from North America / where the buildings are old and you might have lots of mimes." He's either being ironic or writing in the voice of the blockheaded American stereotype he's had thrust upon him, or he's unintentionally justifying with his glib dismissal every prejudice he encounters, but none of those three songwriting scenarios excuse the line or help it make sense. And, besides, Murphy isn't from North America, he's from New York City. That's a distinction worth making.

In the absence of any real overarching subject, Sound of Silver becomes the soundtrack to a self-legitimizing lifestyle; Murphy has ostensibly penned an album about what it's like being in LCD Soundsystem and living in New York. It's not entirely "wtf" to suggest that had Trent Reznor spent his peak songwriting years in New York, he might be giving Murphy a run for his money on the club circuit, and that had Murphy grown up in Mercer, Pennsylvania (Smalltown, USA), he might be the reigning king of goth. Impeccable production, rhythm-based pop structures, an anal-retentive attention to instrumentation, and a self-encapsulated scene drive both Murphy and Reznor to provide, again and again, two-dimensional representations of themselves rather than portraits with depth or broader accessibility. The great DFA remix of "The Hand That Feeds" provides further evidence of their unlikely but seamless compatibility; Sound of Silver confirms that LCD is NIN for the In Crowd.

That Murphy is essentially his own source material makes the album a strangely redundant listen. "Get Innocuous" opens with a solo beat that eerily mirrors the solo opening beat of "Losing My Edge," LCD's most recognizable song. Line up "Time to Get Away" against last album's "Disco Infiltrator," each featuring Murphy's peaking falsetto over minimalist, punctuating bass accents, and they come from the same place. "Watch the Tapes," like former single "Give It Up," proves that Murphy has the producing acumen to make muted guitar scratches central to a song, but its reoccurrence can't reproduce its novelty.

Undoubtedly the best fourteen straight minutes on the album is the infectious and highly listenable one-two punch of "Someone Great," about losing a friend, and "All My Friends," about finding old friends again. The former was previewed as a part of Murphy's 45:33, the Nike-requisitioned jogging companion, but is better here with its own borders rather than lending its click and groove to what was largely a context-specific oddity. But "All My Friends," simply put, will probably be considered one of the best songs of 2007 come list time. Part War-era U2 or New Order circa Power, Corruption & Lies (both 1983), a single piano phrase is repeated for the song's entire seven plus minutes while two chords are cycled on bass and guitar creeps into the mix. It's a great display of patience that matches its tonal inexorability to Murphy's retrospective observations on a life of rejuvenated adolescence. He follows the song's central idea -- "You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan / and the next five years trying to be with your friends again" -- with the album's best line: "I wouldn't trade one stupid decision for another five years of life." Where the line finally makes good on Murphy's formula of uncomplicated and sincere self-portraiture, the song itself is also one of the few instances in which Sound of Silver doesn't sound like it was culled from leftovers of the last album.

While Sound of Silver doesn't try or particularly want to distinguish between itself and 2005's self-titled debut, it also rarely repeats that album's sing-along crescendos. Murphy still displays an ear for melody, uncannily shaping his everyman voice into appealing and memorable sequences, but save for the refrain from "Us V. Them," the album never approaches the heights of "On Repeat" or "Movement," let alone the adrenaline rush of early single "Beat Connection." From the stratospheric high of "All My Friends" and "Us V. Them," the album then crashes to the ground.

I'm still tempted to join the party, to take whatever pills are handed me with a plastic cup of beer and turn a blind eye to all the easy fallacies, but as the album closes, Murphy provides his own warnings as to why I shouldn't. On the title track he points out what most of us knew all along, that the 'sound of silver' "makes you want to feel like a teenager / until you remember the feelings of / a real live emotional teenager / then you think again." The faux-piano lounge comedown of "New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down" laments the Disneyfication of New York in which its more dangerous, exciting qualities are banished and its perpetual teenagers are reduced, "like a rat in a cage / pulling minimum wage." As with all of LCD Soundsystem's dance club morality, the worst-case scenario is being bummed out. No one ever got popular singing songs about how we all have to grow up sometime; here, 37 year-old Murphy realizes that being a teenager isn't as fun as he remembered. That's more than a little bit sad, especially when it might have been eschewed in favor of the utopist's never-ending party, which is just more fun, if equally myopic. Sound of Silver might want to start the party, but it ends up the cold, hard look in the mirror the morning after.