This isn’t the something with actual weight mentioned earlier. This is just something.

Summer, oh how she is here. Memorial day weekend + girl out of town + work able to carry on with me just checking me email every few hours = three days with nothing to do outside of play video games, catch up on reading, and listen to loads of music while slowly melting into the couch cushions. Video games are more than covered, as I finished up the first Ratchet & Clank and dove straight into the second, only to discover that they’d fixed all the things that annoyed me while adding a host of new features that largely blend in seemlessly with the core game (the aggravating and dumb space combat sequences aside). As for books, I tore through a good chunk of the graphic novels that were pilling up on my bookshelves and started J.G. Ballard’s harrowing Concrete Island, a book that feels very much like the car wreck that kicks things off in that while you can see where things are headed, you’re powerless to stop them and have no idea how bad they’ll get before it ends. Less than a quarter of the way in and I already want more of his work, which tends to be a good sign. And music? Other than a surprisingly good electro…something or another album from Pantha du Prince, I’ve actually spent all weekend listening to ‘Thin Line’ from Jurrassic 5 and LCD Soundsystem’s new album Sound of Silver. Specifically, ‘Someone Great’.

If LCD’s self-titled debut from a few years ago was all dancing, all the time (with the exception of ‘Tribulations’ paranoid march pointing at what was to come later and…maybe another song that I can’t remember at the moment), detailing the last kicks of a club kid just realizing it was maybe time to retire to the DJ booth permanently, then Sound of Silver is that same kid years down the road, not grown up but getting there. It’s a much more personal album, reaching it’s peak with the one-two punch of ‘Something Great’ and ‘All My Friends’. But where the latter is the reminisces and regrets that come with ten years of being poor and dumb in New York, the former isolates one of those moments in particular, moving back and forth between the good then and the fallout now as if no time has passed while still getting to grips with the loads of it that has.

‘All My Friends’ might be the better song. That hardly matters when there’s no escape from the humidity, the outside world smells like plant death and Eurotrash, and there’s nothing to do but stare at the speakers while James Murphy walks in to adulthood on your stereo.

It’s a simple enough song – once there was a girlfriend and now there isn’t, and that transition is too much for the relationship to bear. It’s once you’ve heard it for the third or fourth time in a row though that you start to realize it’s only simple because you’re coming into the story without context, and that the only way to get that sort of understanding is to put it together yourself. This isn’t being told a story, it’s evesdropping, and listening in means you take what you can get.

First off, it’s pretty clear she’s not just an ex-girlfriend. She’s an ex The Girl with years of misremembering and idealizing adding to the weight that already carries with it. The first line of the song sets up all the awkwardness you could ever want – “I wish that we could talk about it, but there lies the problem” – before walking us through the (again, context-free) break up and inevitable meeting years down the road. Nothing Earth shattering here, no fresh ground being covered, but as with most of Murphy’s more meaningful moments on the record, it’s the little moments that just dig the hooks in and demand jumping the CD back one more time. The wistful recollection of arguing over nothing. The dread over an over morning phone call and the weather’s utter refusal to match the mood of the resulting break up over coffee. The quietly devestating “You’re smaller than my wife imagined/Surprised you were human” towards the end. She was The Girl and now she’s not, and the memory of that is too strong to allow anything more than the most casual involvement in each other’s lives. ‘Someone Great’ is the act of accepting what’s been lost and coming to terms with it, and it just kills. Listen to it at LCD Soundsystem’s MySpace and then go find the album proper.

Filed under: Then I bought me a Walkman