Forget your past

LCD Soundsystem - 'Home' (This Is Happening - 2010)

A month before the release of LCD Soundsystem’s third record This Is Happening, James Murphy told Chuck Klosterman for The Guardian that;

It just feels like this should be the last one. For one thing, I always told myself I wouldn't do LCD past the age of 40.

As the release date comes and goes, he wobbles on that feeling through the press cycle. In June he tells NPR it may be the final album; come August, in The Quietus, he says they will do some 12”s and they might do another album. He made similar threats around 2007’s Sound of Silver, as a TIME article points out. The interviews and pieces from the time all carry a weight of frustration that recording and performing as a band is taking up all his time, and he isn’t devoting time to writing, producing, or running DFA Records, never mind living a life¹.

All of this uncertainty makes ‘Home’ a Schrödinger’s closing track. Is it to be their final goodbye under the LCD Soundsystem moniker, or is the door still ajar? It is a long song, almost eight minutes - but it is an album of long songs: the mean is seven minutes and three songs are longer than eight. The album opens with ‘Dance Yrself Clean’, a song with two hands on the blasting machine detonator, waiting for the Road Runner to zip past and after three minutes we get that release. ‘Home’ doesn’t do that, there’s no explosion. Perhaps it ends with Wile E. Coyote jumping up and down on the plunger and nothing happens. It's an answer (though not the answer) to 'All My Friends': at 40, home isn't the consolation prize. Home is the thing you were missing out on, it was the late nights that were the distraction. The dread of the verses answered with a curiously reassuring refrain - it won’t get any better and that’s fine.

When we compare ‘Home’ as a closer against the other three LCD closers we can see that the other three (‘Great Release’, ‘New York, I Love You’ and ‘Black Screen’) drop in valence, Spotify’s measure of positivity, by around half a point². We are talking about ending up on the floor at 4am feeling more than a little sorry for ourselves on those three records by a wide margin. ‘Home’ is different: It is more positive than the rest of the album and it has more energy. A closing track that stretches out and uplifts like that is a rare beast, with fewer than 10% of closers finishing that way. So on the record that might have been their last, LCD Soundsystem closed with a deviation from their own template.

The following year the maybe became concrete, the band announced that they were winding down from recording, touring and performing live by marking the calendar with their own funeral³. 2 April 2011. The show, later released as The Long Goodbye: LCD Soundsystem Live at Madison Square Garden, was the culmination of the band’s story and they opened the set with the first song of their 'final' studio album and closed the first encore with its last. But there was a second encore, and as the performance entered a fourth hour they reverted to the Broadway curtain call of ‘New York, I Love You, but You’re Bringing Me Down’.

‘Home’ wasn’t the real final word.

‘Does it make you uncomfortable?’ I said ‘Yeah’, and he said, ‘Good, it should. You should be uncomfortable’ … he was always making himself uncomfortable.

Speaking to Lauren Laverne⁴ on BBC6 Music in 2017, James Murphy was recalling the advice⁵ that resurrected LCD Soundsystem within five years of that goodbye show. The voice shouting for an encore was David Bowie's. Over the last years of Bowie’s life, Murphy had slowly been drawn into his orbit, he’d spun out The Next Day’s ‘Love Is Lost’ to ten minutes in a remix that ended up as a single. There was talk about the pair making a record together, then there was talk about co-producing what would become Blackstar with Tony Visconti. That ended up just being contributing percussion on two tracks.⁶ The advice was coming from someone who knew that you can take as many curtain calls as you want until the biggest one comes in - which of course meant, Bowie never saw the resurrection he did much to seed but it was announced less than a week before his death.

When the comeback landed, American Dream finished with ‘Black Screen’, a reversion to type at scale: twelve minutes and a barely veiled eulogy for Bowie, nearly twice the album's average track, energy, volume and valence all down. An elegy that the supposed farewell didn’t reach for. ‘Home’ is the sound of a man keeping his options open, just in case. Murphy spent 2010 hedging his ending and 2011 staging it. One arrived six years later, a real and unavoidable ending at the close of an album that only exists because a dying man told him to be uncomfortable.

1. He also tells Gilbert Cruz in that TIME article that if a woman on an aeroplane asks him what he does, he says he’s in a band; if she asks what kind of music they make, he says, “It’s pop music, it’s kind of dance music, and it’s kind of like punk rock.” - My read is that’s possibly with a hint of embarrassment as he enters his 40s.

2. This is versus a fall of around 0.08 against the album's average across our dataset of two thousand plus albums.

3. The funeral Klosterman himself would preside over in Shut Up and Play the Hits on film.

4. Sending wellwishes her way after recent news about her health.

5. Murphy continues “The first thing that popped into my head was ‘what do you know? You don’t know what it’s like to be uncomfortable’. I was imagining that if I was David Bowie, I’d just be walking around flipping everybody off – unless maybe Lou Reed is there.”

6. ‘Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)’ and ‘Girl Loves Me’