THE NEW BREED TURNING SONIC EDUCATION INTO A REVOLUTION . . . THE

Sunday Herald, The, Apr 3, 2005 by Leon McDermott

QUESTION: what connects Britney Spears, Steve Albini, The Rapture, Janet Jackson, Junior Senior and Nine Inch Nails? Answer:

one man, a quiet, thoughtful-looking New Yorker called James Murphy, pictured right.

A few years ago Murphy, along with British transplant and Mo'Wax veteran Tim Goldsworthy (pictured left), formed The DFA (Death From Above), a recording studio, a label and a production outfit combined.

The DFA started out small, producing local bands in New York, giving guitaraddicted punks shots of ecstatic adrenaline and tight, funky grooves. By early 2004, they were being hailed as geniuses, credited with helping revitalise New York's music scene by dragging it into the 21st century and showing up retro-fetishists like The Strokes for what they were. They produced the Rapture's driving, screaming House Of Jealous Lovers; remixed everyone from feminist electro-rockers Le Tigre to the aforementioned Euro-pop oddballs Junior Senior and industrial icons Nine Inch Nails.

They couldn't be bothered returning Janet Jackson's calls but somehow James Murphy found himself sitting on his studio floor, attempting to write lyrics with Britney Spears, and failing badly.

"I know what kind of lyrics I write, and I can't imagine them coming out of her head, " he explains. "I was thinking, come on, you must hate the world, let's write a song about it." It never happened, but Murphy kept Britney's resulting scribbles.

"I'm going to eBay that shit, " he says.

The past year, however, has seen Murphy concentrate on what's become his main thing: LCD Soundsystem. It's a solo project, in essence (though live, they're a fearsomely heavy six-piece band), and one which drags you on a trip through Murphy's head, full of caustic humour, primal rhythms and clattering, demented funk.

LCD's first single was Losing My Edge, a ragged eight minutes of dancefloor-slaying funk in which Murphy satirised the superior, sneering tendencies of jaded hipsters everywhere, though with enough affection to let you know that he was taking pot shots at himself more than anyone else.

LCD Soundsystem's eponymous debut album, released in January, took things further. All of Losing My Edge's constituent elements are there, but there are also moments where Murphy echoes The Beatles, Brian Eno, The Fall and New Order.

It's punk as it should be, in that it cares not for history's divisions.

Back in 1989, on Nirvana's debut album, there's a song called School. A rabid dirge, it climaxes with Kurt Cobain howling, "you're in high school again" over and over, sick to death of the popularity contest that was his local punk rock scene. It's a sentiment all too familiar to Murphy. His current band might be a thundering, dancefloor-friendly beast, but like all things LCD, things aren't that simple.

Murphy grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, and started playing music when he was 14. He spent most of his 20s in two bands, first Pony and then Speedking, slogging around the underground American circuit that was built up through the 1980s. "Pony had been pretty successful, " he says.

"We were always supposed to get somewhere. Any minute now, [we would be] the next big band from New York. But we just hated each other so much." His next band Speedking didn't fare much better, imploding in 1997.

"We were quite good at what we were doing, but what we were doing was dated and silly. The bands we played with, like Six Finger Satellite, were so superior that it was humiliating. Plus, we made these selfdestructive decisions like 'We're never gonna put an album out, ' out of overarching punk rock ideals. I got it out of my system, thankfully."

Punk, he says, used to be an optimistic thing. "You could listen to Jonathan Richman and the Violent Femmes and Big Black and Neu! And it was all punk rock as long as it wasn't mainstream rock."

But in the 1990s, when he actually got his chance to be in punk rock bands, it was like being back at home. "There were cool kids and loser kids and rules and power games. You had to record a certain way with a certain producer for a certain label . . . even drive a certain van. It just wore me out."

The rules and the declarations of hip never disappear, either; they're just passed on to the next set of anointed bands, something that the song Movement, on their debut album, nails perfectly. Over a vicious guitar assault, Murphy takes to task the wave of garage rock bands that seemed all-pervasive three or four years ago. "It's a movement without the bother of having any meaning. You know, a journalistic movement that announces 'Rock is back! The guitar is back!' Woo-hoo.

But for what? It's f***ing vacuous and the bands are tedious. They all sound like the MC5.

"I get excited about The White Stripes because they're obviously people who are trying to do something of their own. But most bands will never be good because they don't even ask themselves why they were bothering."

Murphy could be talking about his own abortive attempts at being a punk in the 1990s; at least with LCD Soundsystem, he knew exactly why he was bothering before the first inch of tape rolled through the studio mixing desk.