James Murphy has been building monuments of cool for the better part of a decade, and This Is Happening is his Parthenon. LCD Soundsystem's in-the-zeitgeist, post-dancerock, electronic metroplex is a masterpiece (and mashup) of club and indie music, a pulsing production parked in the middle of the urban universe. Witty, accessible, hip, and heady, This Is Happening reconstructs the notion of what it means to be a rock'n'roll god.
Murphy compresses post-punk, new wave, and club music into sprawling musical enterprises, and he rarely strays from stylish production and clever conceits, resulting in brainy climaxes throughout the entire record. For example, at the three-minute mark, opening track "Dance Yrself Clean" explodes into electro-funk euphoria, and other tracks contain similar moments of that-was-cool clarity.
"One Touch" is pulsating post-disco, "I Can Change" is groovy electro-pop, and "Home" is feel- good krautrock. "Pow Pow" is the album's cool epicenter, and, notably, there are few artists that could produce something so audacious, exciting, and catchy. On The D Man's favorite track, Murphy sings "You wanted a hit / but maybe we don't do hits." Ummmmm, right, have you been listening? If you heard this album for the first time while entering a record store, you would not make it out alive--like entering into the hippest wormhole in the time-space continuum, the vortex keeps spinning around until you succumb to the outer reaches of coolness. You wanted a hit? Baby, you just got something bigger.
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