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/ :: posted @ 09:07 / 10 January 2007 ⊙ :: Track Review
LCD Soundsystem :: "All My Friends"
From Sound Of Sliver (DFA; 2007)

Here’s how it starts: eighty seconds of minimalist pianos clattering against one another, shimmering deftly before falling into line and forming a two-note structure over minimal bass and hi-hats. Here’s how it ends: the same elements, but six minutes later tumbling over one another, gushing heroic steam, careening at lightning speed but taking the listener too, and James Murphy out of breath but still pushing words out, begging, “If I could see all my friends tonight,” to devastate the listener while he’s -- the music much bigger than him -- tingling with nostalgia and heartbreak and that moment when you inexplicably laugh really hard after crying really, really hard.

It’s some intense, heart-ringing shit. Would it be callous to hate it? LCD Soundsystem set out to make an anthem with “All My Friends,” and while it’s intensely personal, making explicit mentions to, um, being in LCD Soundsystem, it’s still resolutely transcendental, still knows how to swing a Doc Marten right in the torso of the most jaded indie kid, lines emerging like, “I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision / For another five years of life.” It’s hopeless and furious and beautiful sentiment, a tug back into the pubescent mindset that caught fire with a little alcohol and music and girls and a joint or two in the very early morning. All of which understandably sounds pretty Chris Carrabba, but LCD pare down the music to a core contingent of sounds for maximum emotive power, and Murphy’s lyrics build not into a “fuck my parents” explosion but into a more subtle, mature inversion, fearing the end of that bleary way of living, of that community that keeps him alive and of the stone-sober 3 a.m. realization that the fun part of life is over: “And with a face like a dad and a laughable stare / You can sleep on the plane or review what you said / When you’re drunk and the kids look impossibly tan / You’ll come over and over, hey, I’m finally dead.” And so that line that bears the song’s title, panted over and over after seven minutes of dread, is eulogistic -- not celebratory but revelatory, and ardently, profoundly sad.

There’s more that I could say about this track, but you, readers, will probably say it all to each other anyway beneath a case of PBR. In other words: Here, indie world, is your “Baba O’Riley.” Hate it at your own risk.

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