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**LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening**
★★★★☆

James Murphy knew the end was coming. By 2010, the disco-punk prophet of LCD Soundsystem had already announced his intention to pull the plug on his beloved project, making "This Is Happening" feel like a wake before the funeral – a bittersweet celebration of everything that made this Brooklyn outfit so vital to the indie-dance revolution of the noughties.

Following the critical triumph of 2007's "Sound of Silver," Murphy found himself in an unexpected position: the underground hero had gone overground, his neurotic dance-punk anthems soundtracking indie discos from Shoreditch to Williamsburg. But rather than chase commercial success, "This Is Happening" doubles down on everything that made LCD Soundsystem essential – Murphy's self-deprecating wit, his encyclopedic knowledge of dance music history, and his uncanny ability to make existential dread sound absolutely euphoric.

The album opens with "Dance Yrself Clean," a masterclass in tension and release that begins as a whispered confessional before exploding into a euphoric disco-rock maelstrom. It's Murphy at his most vulnerable and triumphant simultaneously – admitting his flaws while commanding you to lose yourself on the dancefloor. The track perfectly encapsulates LCD's genius: taking the communal ecstasy of dance music and filtering it through the lens of indie rock's emotional complexity.

Murphy's musical palette here draws from his usual suspects – Kraftwerk's robotic precision, David Bowie's art-rock theatricality, and disco's four-four thump – but there's a newfound maturity to the arrangements. The influence of producers David Andrew Sitek and Murphy himself is evident in the album's warm, analog heft. These aren't just songs; they're sonic environments that envelop the listener in layers of synthesizers, live drums, and Murphy's distinctive talk-sing vocals.

"All My Friends" may have been the previous album's emotional centerpiece, but "This Is Happening" offers "I Can Change" as its heart-on-sleeve moment. Built around a hypnotic Eno-esque synth sequence, it finds Murphy grappling with the possibility of personal transformation while admitting his fundamental inability to do so. It's achingly beautiful and brutally honest – the sound of a man approaching middle age and wondering if he's missed his chance for genuine connection.

The album's most audacious moment comes with "45:33," originally composed as a single 45-minute piece for Nike's Original Run series. Here, edited down to a more digestible length, it showcases Murphy's skills as a DJ and composer, seamlessly blending motifs and rhythms into a hypnotic journey that feels both ancient and futuristic. It's LCD Soundsystem as cosmic disco shamans, guiding listeners through an electronic vision quest.

"Pow Pow" and "Drunk Girls" provide the album's most immediate pleasures – the former a krautrock-influenced stomper that could soundtrack a chase scene through 1970s Berlin, the latter a cheeky deconstruction of rock'n'roll clichés that somehow manages to be both ironic and genuinely exciting. Murphy's lyrics here are characteristically sharp, skewering hipster culture while remaining utterly complicit in it.

The closing "New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down" serves as both love letter and breakup song to the city that made LCD Soundsystem possible. Murphy's observations about gentrification and cultural change feel prophetic now, a decade later, as the New York that birthed this music has largely been priced out of existence.

What makes "This Is Happening" so compelling is its awareness of its own place in music history. Murphy never hides his influences – instead, he wears them proudly while creating something genuinely new. This is postmodern dance music that acknowledges its debt to the past while pushing boldly into the future.

The album's legacy has only grown stronger with time. LCD Soundsystem's supposed farewell at Madison Square Garden became the stuff of legend, documented in the film "Shut Up and Play the Hits." When Murphy inevitably reformed the band in 2016, "This Is Happening" stood as the perfect full stop – a career-defining statement that captured a band at the height of their powers, saying goodbye on their own terms.

"This Is Happening" remains LCD Soundsystem's most cohesive statement, a perfect