For the guts of 10 years those of us who dabble in the night-time behaviours of dancing and and listening to electronic music have been screaming, "Where are my friends tonight? If I could see all my friends tonight," even though our friends are right in front of us. Yelling beside us. Sharing our plastic pint glasses of water and occasionally smushing our faces for effect.
LCD Soundsystem's All My Friends, from their 2007 album, Sound of Silver, is a calling card for people of a certain age. It takes just three seconds for the song to rouse the dancing spirit in Electric Picnickers. By the first chorus they will have formed an iron-tight circle and act as if they haven't heard it in years when, really, an LCD Soundsystem song is never too far away. It's either loitering in a Spotify playlist or saved as the last song at club nights, making it the common bond for friends who don't know when they should go home.
If you haven’t allowed this week’s new VBFs into your life, now’s the time.
Fronted by the permanently unfazed James Murphy, and joined by the effortlessly cool Nancy Whang, DFA’s Pat Mahoney, !!!’s Tyler Pope and Hot Chip’s Al Doyle, among many others, LCD Soundsystem back up their punk mentality with escalating electro thuds and a deep sense of irony.
But what they really want you to do is dance – although their music allows you to do the reverse of working up a sweat. Dance Yrself Clean, from 2010, starts with a whisper of drumbeat that turns into a full body slam. "Talking like a jerk, except you are an actual jerk, and living proof that sometimes friends are mean," Murphy deadpans, confirming that, yeah, sometimes friends can be mean, but they're your mean friends.
Dance Yrself Cleans slowly builds up steam until – bam! – three minutes and five seconds into the song the universe shifts a little to coincide with your aforementioned body slam, and in that instant you know you're exactly where you're meant to be.
Or, as the years pass on by, you recognise yourself more and more in the daftly bitter Losing My Edge. "I'm losing my edge to better-looking people, with better ideas and more talent and they're actually really, really nice," Murphy says through gritted teeth, reassuring himself that he's still got it, whatever it is. This is what we tell ourselves when we get tickets to an LCD gig that sold out in minutes.
LCD Soundsystem's music celebrates real life. By acknowledging loss on the tear-inducing Someone Great, the chew-up-and-spit-out nature of city living on New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down and our pretentious assertions on Daft Punk Is Playing at My House, they reflect the very best and very worst in us. And if you fancy seeing all of that unfold while passing around a plastic pint glass of water between your circle of friends, LCD Soundsystem are playing Malahide Castle on June 5th, playing songs from their new album, American Dream. And despite years of telling us that they don't do hits, that's exactly what they'll do.
