Discography Deep Dive: LCD Soundsystem

THE SECOND INSTALLMENT OF THE DISCOGRAPHY DEEP DIVE! That's a good sign that I care to continue! Today we spotlight a band that ISN'T gone yet: LCD Soundsystem.

The name of the band sounds like something that costs too much at Best Buy, but rest assured that this is instead an indie electronic dance-punk outfit formed in NEW! YORK! CITY!! by brainchild James Murphy. If "deconstructed club" wasn't already an existing term for something else I'd use it to describe this. Murphy takes the tropes of regular dance club music and adds elements of alternative rock, smartass meta-lyrics about music and the industry, and charisma! The band's four albums are all critically-acclaimed and I'm here to also jerk off all over them with adequate fervor.

	LCD Soundsystem (2005) The band's self-titled debut kicked off 2005 with a January release and it had already become an AOTY contender! Murphy and Co. released a lot of singles as a lead up to this album, most notably "Losing My Edge" which is an eight-minute semi-self aware diatribe surrounding Murphy's ego about playing underground music during his DJ days. I say semi-self aware because I can tell he totally wrote this song and namedropped a bunch of underground bands PRIMARILY for ego-stroking, no matter what he might say about it. My own rant aside, the more common release of LCD Soundsystem is a double album comprising the album proper on Disc 1 and the collection of singles and B-sides on Disc 2. Clocking in at 100 minutes of music, it's a weighty collection of off-kilter, cerebral club dance music with influences drawn from disco, punk, indie rock, and classic rock. It's good, albeit overlong and somewhat unfocused at times. The beats are occasionally sparse, but everything is immensely listenable and some tracks are, dare I say, actually memorable! Murphy wears his Brian Eno influences on his sleeves with the proper closer "Great Release", which is just as long and meandering as a genuine Eno album closer! Ha! The breakout hit "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" is a fantastic opener on the main album and is probably the best song here. For my money, the second disc is a little more interesting and my favorite track is the full version of "Yr City's a Sucker", which runs through a lengthy and sinister urban vamp with a sick bassline reminescent of Fear of Music-era Talking Heads The debut is good, not great. Room to grow for sure and for Murphy to make LCD Soundsystem his own. Rating: 7/10
	Sound of Silver (2007) This is pretty good but I don't think it's as good as everyone says. LCD Soundsystem's second album received rave reviews upon release and nearly topped a significant number year-end charts. Personally, this album suffers the same inconsistency that I feel from the debut. This time, though, the overall songwriting quality is skewed upward. The standouts for me are "North American Scum", where Murphy sings like he has a stuffed-up nose and gets defensive about 'Murica, and especially "Someone Great", which is stunningly emotional and beautiful. "Someone Great" is worth the price of admission alone. I also really like the extended bleepy-bloopy electronics in the last half of the title track "Sound of Silver". It's dynamic and infectious, just like the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 variant COVID-19! Speaking of which, how's that working out for everyone these days? Everything else I can't get too excited about and it's not worth going into specific detail about them here. There's nothing bad. It's all enjoyable, yes, but there's a lot of sameiness to Sound of Silver that causes frequent lapses in my attention over the course of 55 minutes. Maybe this shit was the Big Cheese in 2007, but this is 2021 baby. I need more BTS influence! Rating: 8/10
	This Is Happening (2010) It happened, all right! The pinnacle! This is an album I can get excited about! Every track has a personality, every track is memorable, a lot of tracks are even thrilling. The album is diverse. Emotions in all directions are everywhere. This Is Happening feels like the logical next-step, the culmination of everything that makes LCD Soundsystem good. Murphy's getting older, he just turned 40. The wisdom of age prevails. "Dance Yrself Clean" is a perfect opener, beginning with a quiet and subdued but peppy electronic loop that brightens and loudens after a couple minutes, symbolizing kicking down the door of the and dance club and letting the music run free. "Drunk Girls" is energetic, short and sweet. "One Touch" is a robotic, futuristic, creepy incel dance party! "All I Want" is an Eno-esque hypnotic and loopy dreamscape! "I Can Change" is a somber Gary Numan new wave dirge! "You Wanted a Hit" is a nine-minute anti-commercial anti-hit! "Pow Pow" feels like a leftover from Sound of Silver, but it's a good leftover! "Somebody's Calling Me" is a slow, jazzy number replete with pensive introspection! "Home" is the culmination of it all, the perfectly tempoed cooldown closer! That's all the songs, baby! What a great way to end a career! Rating: 10/10
	American Dream (2017) Oh shit, it's not over? Even after an announcement and a farewell concert? Well, good! After a few years hiatus, the band reunited and cut another strong collection of tracks for American Dream. The vibe this time seems melancholy, with Murphy pushing 50 the lyrics are a lot more straightforward and introspective than we've heard before. A lot of the album roots itself in '80s gothic synthwave, especially tracks like "Oh Baby", "I Used To", and the title track "American Dream". Even the tracks that aren't awash in gloomy synths are still at least, you know, peppered with gloomy synths. The sound is more full and round than the sparse techno of the past. LCD Soundsystem haven't strayed too far from their usual formula; American Dream is the usual fare of looping dance numbers and long track lengths with similar influences driving the creative train. PAR EXEMPLE, I'm gonna bring up Eno a third time, because Murphy is clearly a big fan: "Change Yr Mind" is yet another faithful Eno tribute. I haven't decided yet if it sounds more like Byrne/Eno or Bowie/Eno, but the whole song is a dead ringer for Side A of Eno's Before and After Science album. Old fans will be delighted that the band is still recognizable, new fans will be delighted by...I don't know, these aging Gen-Xers coming to terms with the cool world of music attempting to move on without them, I guess? These guys aren't washed up, yet, though! I'm looking forward to Album 5, there's no reason to expect a decline yet! Rating: 8/10

Discography Deep Dive: Ween

Once again I, the sucker, am going to introduce a brand new stupid feature in a vain and lukewarm attempt to jump start my rapidly declining interest in writing. I look forward to abandoning this idea after two installments! On with the farce!

For the first ever entry of my newest polished turd, DISCOGRAPHY! DEEP! DIVE!, I have decided to spotlight *drops notes on the floor* *slips on a banana peel* *murders Jesus* ...Ween. That's an easy one! I already wrote a few real album reviews for Ween! Tom, you shrewd genius you.

Ween comprises of childhood friends Aaron Freeman (Gene Ween) and Mickey Melchiondo (Dean Ween). They literally came from nothing, meeting each other during middle school growing up in their wealthy little middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania town. They made music at each other's houses after school, they played at tiny neighborhood clubs and bars, they secured more high-profile gigs out in New Jersey once in a while, all the while slowly building up their exposure in the pre-Internet era and growing their ravenous cult following. I don't throw out the word "genius" lightly, I even SCORN the honorific title many times in this very blog, but I consider these two guys geniuses without hesitation. Their interviews are humble, their creative intentions were pure and unaffected by fame and criticism, and their ability to camouflage themselves as any type and genre of band they wanted to be was simultaneously competent and effortless. These dudes love music; you can't be a band like Ween without loving music to the extent they do. Their love letters to classic rock, funk, soul, pop, psychedelia, and outsider music are everywhere, on every track and on every album.

Ween's catalog isn't perfect, but they created some of the most genuinely resonant and inventive pop and rock music that the wrong side of the classic rock era has to offer. COME CELEBRATE WITH ME, I INSIST.

	GodWeenSatan: The Oneness (1990) Ween's debut album is loud, trashy, annoying, and pink, and I wouldn't change a single goddamned thing about it. 26 tracks are crammed into 70 minutes, and the reissue adds an additional three! Gene and Ween scream and yell and shred and whine and cry and, dare I say, even croon. There's not one ounce of filler, because anything that could even be perceived as filler makes up essential framework of the album as a whole. Ween delivers every line and note with such earnest love of music in general that everything, all the cheesiness and juvenile antics, it all just works. GodWeenSatan: The Oneness might not be their best album, and it's objectively not their most musically mature album (in many ways, duh), but it's my personal favorite by a mile. It's because I'm still a horrible child. My personal picks include "L.M.L.Y.P.", which is an 8-minute Prince tribute that even out-vulgars Prince himself GOD REST HIS SOUL, and "Nicole", which is a 9-minute breakup song where the first half is cute and plinky and the last half descends into petty madness. Every other song on the album is, like, barely two minutes long. It's wonderful. Also, the reissue was released on September 11, 2001. I'm guessing it was the highlight of that day. Rating: 10/10
	The Pod (1991) Ween's sophomore slump! Maybe. My opinion anyway. Most fans swear by this album but I place it firmly in my bottom half. The Pod is the sluggish, murky antithesis to GodWeenSatan's dayglo, manic offering. While all the songs on the debut are bright, crisp, crunchy, and PINK, all the songs on The Pod are swampy, sludgy, plodding, and BROWN. And, as any Ween fan knows, "brown" is better...but I find this album to be kind of a slog. Especially the second half, which is, almost without exception, one forgettable drone after another. However, it's not without it's merits. The boys set out to create one big fever trip and I can't think of a better album IN HISTORY that captures that mood with such authenticity. "The Stallion (Pt. 1)" and "Mononucleosis" are standout tracks, and the stoned Mexican food order of "Pollo Asado" will always be funny to me. It's just that many of these 23 tracks are criminally forgettable, and even if this album was pared down by half I think it would lose the intentional effect of the vast, foggy wasteland crafted here. Anyway, a lot of this one's not really for me unfortunately. I don't spin it too often. Rating: 6/10
	Pure Guava (1992) What the fuck? This one's even worse! It's like they scooped up scraps from the cutting room floor of The Pod sessions and cobbled it together in two days just to piss of Elektra for no reason on their major label debut. And all that gloomy 4-track production from the previous album that gave it thematic consistency? It's gone here. This album sounds almost entirely like a bunch of fucking around in a studio and then mixed into this sterile, phlegmatic final product. Pure Guava contains Ween's biggest hit "Push th' Little Daisies", a song about nipples that was featured on Beavis & Butthead! That one's pretty good! Other than that, "The Goin' Gets Tough from the Getgo" is an amusing beatnik rap where Deaner and Gener play two insufferably pretentious Wes Anderson-types with their berets and their unfiltered cigarettes, and I have a soft spot for "Reggaejunkiejew", but everything else is either somewhat entertaining on a shallow level ("Big Jilm"), mediocre (almost the entire last half of the record), or completely uninteresting and annoying ("Mourning Glory"). This is the only Ween album that makes me feel absolutely nothing. At least The Pod has atmosphere. Rating: 3/10
	Chocolate and Cheese (1994) Now we're talking, back to business! This is the first studio album in which Ween takes advantage of using, you know, an actual professional studio. The results are a game-changer for the band. With the first three albums the production values were low, deliberately low in some cases, but the sound all across the board on Chocolate and Cheese is full and clean. For the first time, most of the tunes sound so genuine and polished you can't tell if they're meant to be funny or not. From the Vegas stage act of "Take Me Away", to the sadboi country ballad of "Drifter in the Dark", to the sweet springtime folksiness of "Joppa Road", to the dramatic Ennio Morricone-style Spaghetti Western of "Buenas Tardes Amigo", and everything in between, it's all so carefully and impressively varied and crafted. I've heard this album described as a collection of songs that could've been by 16 different bands. Pick any five tracks at random, play each one to your friends, have them guess the band, and WATCH THEIR JAWS DROP when you tell them. Because they'll be thinking "Who the fuck is Ween?" Rating: 9/10
	12 Golden Country Greats (1996) The Ween boys continue making great on their promise to keep their fans guessing. Did anyone expect an entire record of country songs? It's the only album in their catalog that sticks exclusively with one genre, but even that didn't stop them from being diverse. All these country songs, ten to be exact (not 12, as the title accidentally suggests. Gener tried to explain that the "12" represents the number of guest musicians on the album but it was later revealed that they just fucked up), run the whole spectrum of country music. I don't know anything about country music though, so I'll do my best to describe it anyway! Slow and sad! Jaunty and happy! Jangly and pensive! I don't know! Some of this sounds like Johnny Cash, some of it sounds like Gram Parsons, some of it sounds like country-fied Bob Dylan, and that's about the extent of my knowledge on the subject. This album used to scare me. 15 years ago I hated country music, and today it's one of the last genres I still have too closed of a mind about. BECAUSE it was Ween, though, I think I was able to break through a little bit on this particular record. The fine line between juvenile and clever humor is still there, of course, and the songwriting is as catchy as you'd hope. Most of these songs don't resonate with me very well, such as "I'm Holding You", "Pretty Girl", or "Fluffy", but "You Were the Fool" is absolutely gorgeous and "Piss Up a Rope" is pure Ween through and through. The good news is that 12 Golden Country Greats is just over half an hour long, so even if country music is absolutely not your cup of moonshine then it certainly doesn't overstay its welcome. At least when the day finally comes that my appreciation for this kind of music clicks, I can pinpoint this album as the one that started it all. But for now? Ehh. Rating: 5/10
	The Mollusk (1997) As time went on and their confidence improved with respect to utilizing all that a full studio could offer, Ween started padding out the roster of their outfit and attempted to overcome the limitations of their contributions to their music as only a duo. Did you get through that whole awful sentence? Christ. By now they have a traditional band, and can start playing some traditional rock music. No more drum machines! Going full They Might Be Giants on our filthy asses. The Mollusk is the clear fan favorite (not counting, blech, The Pod). It deserves that distinction. It's not my favorite though! For my money, the debut beats The Mollusk any day! While I consider the filler of GodWeenSatan to be, like load-bearing so to speak, I consider the filler on The Mollusk to be distracting. Does that make sense?? For the debut the filler contributes the album's personality, while the filler here is completely unneeded and, since the really good stuff here is the best Ween stuff in existence, I consider it more inexcusable. I am referring to, of course, "Pink Eye (On My Leg)" and "Waving My Dick in the Wind", two back-to-back tracks on the second half that completely kill the momentum that was starting to falter anyway coming off of "Cold Blows the Wind". This album is almost perfect, and I don't use that term loosely. Cut those two tracks out completely and this album is a 10/10, and a contender for any other 10/10 album on the full list of 10/10 albums. Too bad. Less talented bands can only dream of developing a run of songs even half as strong as everything from "The Mollusk" to "It's Gonna Be (Alright)". All these tracks are incredible displays of tight songwriting, atmosphere, and emotion. The overarching nautical theme of the album is so on-point that you can even smell the sea air during the drunken and cacophonous Irish pub song "The Blarney Stone". Deaner rips out the most watery guitar solo ever recorded and mixed on "I'll Be Your Jonny on the Spot". You can feel the jellyfish squirming around on "Mutilated Lips" while they paint a vivid, trippy, nonsensical picture of the deep ocean WITH BARELY ANY references to the water! Now that's talent. Unfortunately, the filler sets in on the back half until finishing strong with the final three tracks "Buckingham Green", "Ocean Man" (the Spongebob song), and "She Wanted to Leave". I will not undermine this album's status as a cult classic. It's a timeless statement of musical achievement. It's probably one of the best rock albums of the '90s. Almost perfect. Fine, I'll give it a perfect score. Whatever. Even those two tracks shouldn't really bring it down. Rating: 10/10
	White Pepper (2000) Let the sophistication continue! White Pepper, if it's not obvious from the title alone, is the Beatles tribute. But it's not all Beatles, there's some other classic rock on here. "Bananas and Blow" sounds like Jimmy Buffet, "Stroker Ace" sounds like Motörhead, "Pandy Fackler" sounds like Steely Dan. The first three tracks are pure Beatles, though, and most of the album in general has some of the most straight-forward and accessible music Ween has ever made. I have to make a special mention of "Flutes of Chi", with its infectious melody, whispers of psychedelia, and a pitch-perfect pop music sensibility. It absolutely could've been a Beatles hit. Play it for any stubborn Beatles fan and watch them start jerkin' it and frothing uncontrollably before you reveal the secret misdirection! They will laugh and laugh and they will not stop until they're dead. Until they're fucking dead. Where was I?? White Pepper is Ween finally embracing their version of maturity. I mean, come on, they were both around 30 years old by this time. That's ancient in rock-and-roll years. And this album of glossy, adult contemporary dad-rock with the occasional dick jokes is a testament to the established band's carved-out niche. In short, I love this album but I probably wouldn't if some other band did it. That's the Ween brand for ya! Rating: 9/10
	Quebec (2003) Quebec is the spiritual sequel to Chocolate and Cheese: just a mixed bag of really good songs with no real thematic connection. Dream pop on "Zoloft", psychedelic space-folk on "Among His Tribe", aggressively trippy avant-pop on "Happy Colored Marbles", classic prog on "The Argus", overdramatic alt-rock on "If You Could Save Yourself (You'd Save Us All)", a skuzzy Motörhead tribute on "It's Gonna Be a Long Night", etc. etc. etc. Dean and Ween were back to basics with this one, working as a duo on many of the album's tracks, so it's really just Chocolate and Cheese with slightly richer instrumentation and 10 years of time behind them. There's not much more that needs to be said. Rating: 8/10
	La Cucaracha (2007) Ehhhhh, this one gets a bad rap. Now that it's likely that this will be the final Ween studio album, I think the collective fanbase is a bit salty about La Cucaracha marring the discography as the swan song. Personally, I like this one a lot better than Pure Guava. It's one last stylistic smorgasbord: you get whimsical Britpop ("Blue Balloon"), faux reggae ("The Fruit Man"), a late '00s overexaggerated auto-tuned nightmare ("Spirit Walker"), incredibly sleazy smooth jazz adult contemporary ("Your Party"), a post-classic Led Zeppelin epic ("Woman and Man"), and others! I forgot the rest but I'm sure they're good! OK, so this album is pretty inessential, but I'm still going to rate it exactly the same as I rated The Pod because I'm the worst Ween fan you've ever encountered. Rating: 6/10