American Dream

The lyrics are fantastic, the grooves irresistible, the ideas constantly entertaining. His sense of fun is infectious. It’s good to have James Murphy back doing what he does best.

American Dream is as close to a unified artistic statement that Murphy has delivered. I’d argue it’s his first front-to-back, total triumph.

The good news is that American Dream delivers, point by point, on everything you could want from an LCD Soundsystem album.

Tonite and Call the Police are as good as anything they’ve done, while Oh, Baby miraculously manages to outshine their dazzling previous work--even if not every track keeps up with this exhilarating pace. The only thing able to overshadow American Dream is LCD’s own formidable past, suggesting that, yes, in fact they are.

American Dream feels like Murphy's darkest record to date, and like previous LCD records, only gets better with repeat listens. In short, it's fucking glorious.

It’s a beautiful work of art about aging, regret and an arduous search for meaning. It’s an expansive record that explores a variety of sounds and themes, but it never feels confused or lost.

It’s a beautifully produced, masterfully realized album, but it’s also a bit of a downer and an unusually slow burn.

As gratifying familiar as much of American Dream will be to longtime fans, it also feels like exactly the album 2017 needs--urgent, angry, achingly self-aware. And catchy as hell, too. [1 Sep 2017, p.53]

American Dream is, in purely sonic terms, their richest, most viscerally pleasurable record yet, rife with layered, polyrhythmic percussion and an encyclopedic array of synth textures. [No. 147, p.56]

While they still don’t do hits, no-one does brooding, slow-burn magnificence quite like Murphy. He builds everything from the ground up, solid foundations augmented by neat details and flourishes. More than ever, American Dream demonstrates how rhythm is central to LCD Soundsystem.

Each song compulsively and unabashedly recalls fragments from their oeuvre but when unified these fragments are cleaner, more assured, and more essential, than possibly anything they’ve thrown at us before. From head to toe, front to back, it bangs; but more importantly, it actually has something new to say.

American Dream is a triumph, then, and possibly LCD Soundsystem's finest album so far. [Oct 2017, p.18]

LCD Soundsystem have made a better album than they've ever done.

American Dream is the upshot of a darker, older, wiser LCD Soundsystem.

Whereas Murphy once took on all of these influences lightly and cleverly, they feel heavier across much of American Dream’s 70 minutes, with the lingering responsibilities of a disappearing history becoming more apparent. On paper, that might sound like a bit of a slog, but this is not the case.

Whereas LCD’s previous album, This Is Happening, felt coherent as the project displayed a love of disco, American Dream feels happy sampling from many of the band’s established recording styles.

Quite how Murphy manages to turn all this sombreness into a great LCD album defies logic, but he has landed on his feet, yet again.

Well, the good news is American Dream rocks, rolls, pops, fizzes and snaps. The energy is still there, no two songs sound the same and the ambition is somehow even more future-retro than before.

Full of irresistible grooves, quotable lyrics, and moments of spine-tingling beauty, American Dream is a worthy addition to the LCD Soundsystem discography.

American Dream is good enough to dispel all of those concerns. The passing of their imperial phase has left them like any formerly Teflon hipster: honest, and ready to move on from whatever they found at the heart of the party. Admitting for real that they’d lost their edge is one of the most interesting things they could’ve done, and hopefully they keep making more records after this one.

James Murphy and his wrecking crew of New York punk-disco marauders don't waste a moment on the superb American Dream--it's a relentless, expansive, maddeningly funny set of songs asking how a lifetime of good intentions and hard work can blow up into such a mess.

American Dream isn't just a triumphant comeback, it's another great album by a great band.

Murphy skillfully layers his sounds for tracks that somehow feel dense and airy at the same time.

This is, by a long distance, the most introspective work that Murphy has yet turned out, and you can feel very palpably the weight of all those anxieties he cited during Shut Up and Play the Hits.

American Dream does exactly what a new LCD Soundsystem album should do: it brings back the rush that listening to the band always has, and adds a compelling new dimension to the band's sound--a mature, realist darkness that they'd only hinted at previously--that suggests Murphy might have been temporarily out of motivation, but he was never out of ideas.

An album that advances the sound of LCD Soundsystem and more than justifies their return, while retaining all that was brilliant about them in the first place. [Oct 2017, p.98]

Just as the record threatens to get Too Much, as ‘How Do You Sleep Tonight’ wrings out its last notes, the crowning glory that is ‘Tonite’ kicks in.

This record, more than any from their back catalogue, is a slow burn. It doesn’t have the spiky malevolence of North American Scum or the punchy pull of Daft Punk Is Playing At My House, but it does have depth to spare. Sonically, it’s the richest record they have produced.

In returning to the project that best suits his sense of adventure, James Murphy has done nothing to tarnish what has gone before. American Dream is a darker, more diverse record than its predecessors and a more human one too.

As far as reunion albums by aging bands go, this one is about as gratifyingly unpredictable as anyone could have hoped for. American Dream is notably more rock-oriented than its predecessors.

American Dream feels like a strong re-statement of what they do, and what they can mean, a record that, despite its fear of death, feels very much alive. [Oct 2017, p.86]

The album gets personal, but in a more low-key way than ever before.

Its best songs are the ones that maintain the spark of originality that has always threaded through LCD Soundsystem’s work,.

American Dream does offer a lot from a songwriting standpoint, and why wouldn’t it? Murphy is a skilled producer with a deft ear for melody. But he’s somehow disrupted that valuable balance of humor and thoughtfulness found in LCD Soundsystem’s past with a more sedate offering that is riddled with mixed messages.

Too many tracks, however, suffer from a shortfall of melodic potency, and a lack of lateral development, especially in longer pieces such as the 12-minute sci-fi musings of “Black Screen” and the declamatory nine minutes of “How Do You Sleep?”.