headlessparrot's Full Review: 45:33:00 by LCD Soundsystem
Music, as I’ve extensively written and you’re well aware, is a tremendously subjective thing. This is an obvious, and widely agreed upon point, but it’s as good a starting point as any for my discussion of LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33. We may both like an album (or we may both hate it), but we may both do so for wildly different reasons. For some, this is infuriating. For others, it can be wonderful, fostering an exchange of ideas that benefits everyone involved, and contributes to a growing body of criticism that uses art as a jumping off point for thought. Ideally, at least, that’s the point. It’s all founded on a wonderfully egalitarian idea that, even where we’re starting from vastly different positions, there is common ground to be found, and new perspective. Hopefully. Critic Noel Murray writes of the personal subjectivity in music criticism, that “If you see arts criticism as one big debate, then those kinds of arguments are never going to count for much. If you see criticism as a way to get to know other people – to see the world through different eyes for awhile, then return to yourself with a better understanding – then those may be the most important arguments.” Naturally, he gets more eloquently and succinctly to the point about an aspect of this subjectivity that I’m trying to explain.
The great thing, in any event, about LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33 is that it actually offers a way to concretely and objectively measure its quality. Granted, there’s a component of novelty at work, and obviously, the objective measurements that 45:33 invites are actually kind of (read: mostly) subjective; but the idea – a digital album, commissioned by Nike, that is “designed to accompany jogging workouts, to reward and push at good intervals of a run” – is a sufficiently compelling one that it’s easy to overlook this in recognition of what is – however you want to characterize it – a truly wonderful record. Or file.
The appeal of an objective measure is doubly compelling when it’s applied to a genre of music about which I’m completely ignorant. I wrote in my Best of 2007 list, of the year’s other LCD Soundsystem release (Sound of Silver) that “Knowing so little about dance music, it's difficult to fully explain just what makes Sound of Silver so utterly wondrous,” and that observation still holds very much true. Aside from LCD Soundsystem, Daft Punk, and Fatboy Slim, I can’t be sure that there’s a single real dance album in my record collection (a quick search turns up two Chemical Brothers tracks and that particularly omnipresent single by Eric Prydz, which shall go unnamed). In point of fact, it’s rather curious that I should like those three aforementioned artists, given that their game is in toying with the very conventions of a genre that I’m inadequately informed of – it’s sort of like loving the discography of Weird Al without knowing any of the songs that are being satirized. My point is, of course, that I’ve never attempted a full-length review of a dance (electronic?) record, because I wouldn’t know where to start. I’d sooner tackle Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue or John Coltrane’s Blue Train – both albums that I love to death, despite being woefully incapable of verbalizing why – before straying into the uncomfortable territory of dance music. And that’s saying a lot, because I have no plans of touching either of those classic jazz records.
45:33 is worth examination – even for a genre neophyte like myself – though, precisely because its ostensible purpose provides at least some kind of quantifiable measure by which it can be judged. In many respects, actually, I can see 45:33 as a superb introduction into the exploration of an underrepresented genre. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that (and I think I’ve mentioned this alright) it’s quite remarkable in any context.
But back to my narrative thrust: I’d heard about 45:33 at the time of its initial release in 2006, as an iTunes only download from the Nike Music Store – one track, 45:58 long (a difference of twenty-five seconds between the title-length and the actual length, for what it’s worth), and intended (nay, scientifically engineered) for the optimization of your workout.
(Warning! Personal anecdote ahead) As someone who flirted with distance running for years (going back to the elementary school cross-country team, but more recently, cramp-and-sweat filled crawls through the neighbourhood), I was intrigued by the concept. But without an iPod, still using Winamp, and sucking dirty pond water through the entirety of fifteen minute jogs, I never gave it much thought. That changed with the purchase of an iPod, and – more importantly – the re-release in 2007 of 45:33 on CD (split up into six tracks and buoyed by three bonus selections). By which time, conveniently, I’d actually started to fancy myself both a runner and a fan of LCD Soundsystem. Long story short (and still, another year later) – like any self-respecting nerd – I felt the need to road test the claims of Nike’s marketing department. Don’t forget, you’re talking to a person who not only owns the Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka, but has made the effort to listen to all four of its discs concurrently. Multiple times.
It didn’t even matter that the whole thing is a farce. Coming from an artist like LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy – (I’m quoting myself) “a punk-rocker who eventually figured out that the most punk-rock thing he could ever do was make dance music” – it shouldn’t have been surprising that the claims made in regards to 45:33 were all pretty absurd. Despite the convoluted observations made prior to its release – claiming, amongst other things, that “Our band, LCD, when on tour tends to do a lot of running,” "I train fighting and Jiu-Jitsu three or four times a week, and a big part of that training is treadmill running, so I saw this also as a way to create a run on the treadmill that worked for me,” and “When I was done adjusting things, much to my surprise, the time the run took was 45 minutes and 33 seconds-- the RPMs of records” (this last one particularly smells of bull) – Murphy ultimately admitted that the workout angle was more or less a fabrication, and that the real inspiration was “making a long-form record like E2-E4 by Manual Gottsching.” Using Nike’s money to do so was merely the icing on the metaphorical cake: a brilliant bit of anti-corporate subversion that should have cemented Murphy’s punk rock reputation. Or it would have, if 45:33 wasn’t perfectly suited for the tenor of a workout anyway. Everyone loves a good critical narrative, but the marketing driven story surrounding the album/song wouldn’t have survived if there wasn’t a germ of truth to it.
I sat down first, however, to listen to 45:33 in its entirety before I took it for a test drive. My reaction to it was quite positive – quite similar to my reaction toward Sound of Silver. But my wordless appreciation for it reflects the dearth of words or ideas I have to express my reaction to something that’s so foreign. Beyond recognizing its instant familiarity (Part II of the composition features a near-verbatim instrumental version of Sound of Silver’s “Someone Great”), the only words I could construct for it were those I’d already wasted on Sound of Silver: “...Any serious attempt to [explain its greatness] has to simply focus on its aesthetic brilliance. The careful selection of beats, the tempo, the layering – they're not just excuses to dance, they're building to something greater. They're part of the story, part of the vibrant world that the songs sketch, the life pulse that travels through the whole record. It is a defiant entry in a genre of carefully constructed, mathematically assembled music, one that sounds so devastatingly natural and organic.” And despite the fact that I’m repeating myself, I don’t think it’s disingenuous to say that this blurb perfectly evokes my feelings toward both 45:33 and Sound of Silver, making use of a limited critical vocabulary. Perhaps 45:33 is a bit more ready-at-hand with the addition of some horns. But to leave it at that would be fundamentally unfair; more importantly, it would be uninteresting.
So in the interest of science, I suited up for an easy recovery run, approximately 7 miles, set to the sonic landscape of LCD Soundsystem. And at the risk of buying into the irritating hype of Nike executives, I was completely amazed by the way 45:33 so perfectly – so effortlessly, so organically – synchronizes with and reacts against the experience of distance running. Not just the tempo, but the entire physiological reality of putting one foot in front of another for step-after-step and mile-after-mile. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the basic logic of exercise music: starting slow, building tempo to a maximum pace, and ending with a gradual cool down period. 45:33 does all of these things. But its shifting rhythms and layered textures feature so many additional nuances that it’s actually difficult to believe Murphy isn’t a runner himself. Opening with a simple pulsating synth – vividly mimicking the rhythmic bounce of a basketball on hardwood – the tempo of 45:33 is constantly adjusting itself, as though in response to physiological signs: starting slow, gaining speed before slowing again, gaining again in a trial-and-error approach toward finding its comfortable stride, ultimately doing so in a hook-heavy, boogie-woogie piano lick (its first lyrics, a repeatedly whispered “Shame On You,” acting as a sneaky kind of reverse-psychology inspiration). It captures brilliantly the bouncing-ball enthusiasm of a run in its infancy.
As most runners might tell you, that enthusiasm doesn’t last long: excitement is replaced by a dread that’s both mimicked and manipulated by the strands of an instrumental “Someone Great” (a preview of one of Sound of Silver’s brightest moments) – its droning repetitions reflecting tedium while the sci-fi blips and xylophone fills gently prod. At which point – about 3 miles in for myself – 45:33 hits its stride in the meat of a run, locking first into a high-tempo disco-groove, and then into a collapsing mishmash of hyper-fast cyberpunk: beats, synths, horns, and vocoder fighting for dominance. What’s interesting is that the tempo at this peak moment is almost absurdly fast, but it’s a combative reaction to the exhaustion that sets in during the second half of a high-tempo run – by gradually upping the pace until it almost implodes in upon itself, 45:33 subconsciously counteracts the slowdown that occurs in runners who have poorly paced themselves. I can’t even begin to relate how good I felt at this point, focussed on the almost musical synthesis of foot strikes, deep breaths, and LCD Soundsystem’s dense, theatrical composition. Runner or not, Murphy is incredibly on-the-ball in his observations:
“In testing, I found that 'hard, fast, propulsive' music was NOT the best running music for me-- this was maybe why my bandmates had gravitated to the more sprawling tracks in our catalogue. The fast tracks were too close to the running pace and could be distracting in a bad way. These other tracks that inverted themselves more had moments and bits that kept the mind occupied (distracting in a good way) and settled into gentle bits more often, giving the runner a sense of push as well as rest. Sometimes the best way to keep running is to find that parts of the run are actually rests--that while you're still running, you're viewing some of the run as soothing and recuperative, rather than constantly feeling like you're running for your life.”
Finally, the rapture of its cool down builds, eschewing the emphatic percussion of the rest of 45:33, in favour of 8-bit, atmospheric organ swells. The dense, shimmering vibrations lack any real structure, but are the sort of sonic encapsulation of a euphoric, almost metaphysical high – I’ve never experienced the so-called “runner’s high,” but this simply has to be its aural equivalent. Listening at home, this final part of 45:33’s extended suite is perhaps the most disconnected component of an otherwise heavy hitting album: lacking in the propulsive urgency of the record’s first forty minutes. But after actually running along to its heady strains, it becomes apparent that that’s the point: the unstructured waves of sound are a sort of blank canvas that allows a runner – after six miles of insistent, foot-pounding movement – their own creativity, to either push or hold back, without the prodding of Murphy’s dance-punk percussion.
What’s most amazing to me, though, was the way that – even on an easy run, in bitterly cold weather, the day after an all-out 7-mile run – 45:33 somehow both relaxed and pushed my movement, to the point where I felt better even while working harder. The result being that I somehow managed to shave over 1:30 off of my previous personal best. I’m not prepared to credit 45:33 for those minutes – that’s my accomplishment, as trivial as it is in the grand scheme of things – but it’s difficult not to read into this some kind of inspiration, if not correlation. Obviously, there wasn’t anything particularly scientific about the test that I conducted, and here the idea of objectivity kind of crumbles: those lost 1:30 could just have easily been due to a subconscious push owing to my perceived reaction to the music rather than my actual reaction to the music. Or I just could have been feeling good. The wind could have helped me along. Or I could have encountered the perfect sequence of stop lights over the course of my neighbourhood loop. But even if one of those is the case, it can’t take away how perfectly attenuated 45:33 felt to my movement, and how utterly amazing it felt doing something that I usually find so (at best) tedious or (at worst) agonizing. With 45:33 – and I know this sounds ridiculous – I felt like the wind was always at my back, whether it actually was or not[1].
Marketing tripe, mindfuck, or whatever, it turns out that 45:33 actually is a wonderful accompaniment to a workout, even if I am imagining (and I’m not ruling out this possibility) or exaggerating its most noteworthy physiological effects. It’s the sound of something epic. 45:33 is not much for pop songcraft – you’ll have to go to the equally compelling Sound of Silver for that – but its grandiosity is compelling, fascinating, complex and yet eminently likeable. The bonus tracks? They’re a nice thought, but completely beside the point.
It does beg the question, however: if James Murphy isn’t a runner, how has he tapped so vividly into the subtle biomechanical detail of something so complex? Here I think a plethora of other reviewers have already nailed it, and I’ll let them have the last word: running is but an extension of human movement. And as an artist whose wild polyrhythms and immaculate synth-pop make even someone as rhythmically challenged as myself want to dance like an idiot, it’s plainly apparent that – as Stylus Magazine so precisely put it – “James Murphy understands how to make people move on a basic, physical level.”
____________________ [1] – By contrast, I’ve often run while listening to the latest albums in a variety of genres. Off the top of my head, I vividly recall Radiohead’s In Rainbows, and the way I felt, as though I were slogging through mud for five miles.
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