I keep on listening and thinking about James Murphy’s This Is Happenning and I’ve been sick since I bought it and I think being sick and stuck at home and missing the four nights at terminal 5 and (I woulda scalped a tix last night for it -I was seriously considering it all day if only to see the great Holy Ghost! and not only to see the great Holy Ghost! but that venue -ugh!! I coulda never made it) and listening to dance music MADE TO BE PLAYED LOUD very low is clouding my opinions.
I need to blast the ten minut “Throw” because it ain’t working for me as some sorta fuzzed and drug addled ambient music. What is working is working as song and what is failing is failing as dance -and I think it is because it seems to be playing from far away. It is like the sound of kids coming at me from from away: like I can’t quite make anything out but a relentless thump thump thump, and as advocate for “MORE BASS” it is OK as far as it goes, it is OK during remix # 4 of “I’ve Gotta Feeling” but on a concept album where the concept is in the package (all self-referencing losers on the dancefloor so it sounds like what it is what it sounds like) it needs to re-enviromentalized.
It needs to be heard differently than the way I am doing, and by somebody with a better feel for dance than I have, to be grasped.
“Throw” feels like an irrelevance, it feels like an indulgence I’d prefer if I wasn’t imdulging in this way. Like chocolate mousse for breakfast.
The album doesn’t live there.
It lives here: “Drunk Girls” near the begining, and “I Can Change” and “You Wanted A Hit in the middle. It slides out with the miss “Home” and ends with the extended dance track “Throw”. and the rest is as good as Sound Of Silver -which rests so hard on :”All My Friends” and “North American Scum” the album appears to be something it isn’t. It appears unified when it is thematicly simplistic (and so self-observed it feels diaryish) though some of this might be incompetence. Murphy is way prosaic…
Here is thesetlist from thursday gig:
Us v Them
Us v Them
Drunk Girls
Get Innocuous
Yr City’s A Sucker
Pow Pow
Daft Punk is Playing at My House
All I Want
All My Friends
I Can Change
Tribulations
Movement
Yeah
encore:
Someone Great
Losing My Edge
New York, I Love You But Your Bringing Me Down
Empire State of Mind
Dunno what caught your eye, what I noticed was the “All My Friends”/”I Can Change” round the middle. He one twoed not his best rhtyhms but his best songs. Musta been pretty devastating. Musta been a great four nights.
As for me? What I like I love and what I don’t like I probably would have loved live.