then it's the memories of our betters that are keeping us on our feet.

(That’s three-for-three on LCD Soundsystem-inspired titles, by the way.)

My biggest problem with LCD Soundsystem (the alter ego of James Murphy) before I heard Sound of Silver was that I thought it was generic. I’d heard “Losing My Edge” and a bevy of other singles at a party no one in particular enjoyed; the wave of beats might as well have been Lady Gaga, or, hell, even the Black Eyed Peas. Compounding the issue was that what lyrics I could make out seemed phony, forced, or copied. Oh, it’s so tough to be an aging hipster! Oh, it’s so wearisome to go to all these parties!

Sound of Silver is a lot of things, but it isn’t generic. The album illustrates the basic similarities of dance and post-punk music, which in retrospect are pretty obvious; post-punk is much darker, but it’s no great surprise that the quintessential post-punk band, Joy Division, was reborn as the highly-successful electronic outfit New Order. The bookends of an excellent three-song run in the middle of the album, “Someone Great” and “Us v Them,” manage to combine driving, funky dance beats with jangling post-punk guitar and foreboding piano. The major themes of those two songs? Grief, paranoia, and isolation, hearkening back to a variety of Joy Division's wrist-slitting modes. The album’s major accomplishment isn’t making electronic music sad, which plenty of people have done (or attempted to do).  Sound of Silver’s success lies in never sacrificing its constant, stunning movement for atmosphere; most albums in this vein veer toward one genre or the other, but even in its more forgettable tracks, Sound of Silver meets dance and post-punk exactly halfway.

Is it authentic? Well, part of what makes the album so unique is that it’s copying a lot of different influences, and copying them effectively. The most victimized source is David Bowie: Murphy apes his voice shamelessly (but effectively) across the album, especially on the title track; the end of “Watch the Tapes” steals the relentless piano of “Star”; “New York I Love You” has the same blues structure, climaxes, and, on occasion, even the same lyrics as “Rock ‘n Roll Suicide”; and the album’s tone as a whole hearkens back to the Berlin era. David Byrne, Ian Curtis, and even Lou Reed all have legitimate complaints, too. Does that make the album less authentic? I tend to think so–it’s easy, for instance, to mimic David Byrne if you want to sound paranoid—but the album’s best song, and undoubtedly the best one Murphy will ever write, is completely sincere. “All My Friends” is a perfect song about a simple theme: home, found either in family or friends. It’s something you don’t see much, unfortunately, in indie music: something sweet, pure, and hopeful.

The presence of that great three-song run—“Someone Great,” “All My Friends,” and “Us v Them”—makes the rest of the album pale a bit in comparison. It’s consistently good ("Get Innocuous" and “New York I Love You” would highlight a lesser album), but there are still some weak tracks, especially the back-to-back “Time to Get Away” and “North American Scum,” which reminded me of a lot of the problems I had with LCD Soundsystem to begin with.  Sound of Silver is still an excellent album, but those conventional flaws leave it, in my opinion, just short of the canonical status it’s already reached in the critical community.

Grade: A-