LCD Soundsystem – Christmas Will Break Your Heart Review

Hearts still break for those who cannot get over the return of LCD Soundsystem. They played their farewell gig, released the lush five-LP vinyl and then, just a few years later, committed the cardinal sin of finding a new route through a creative slump. If every band that called time on their initial run had stuck to what they said, it would be a dire time for music. Christmas Will Break Your Heart marked this sudden reunion, the promise of further material from James Murphy and the electronic outsiders who, as time passes, find themselves on the inside, trying to claw their way back out to being influenced by Scott Walker and 10cc. Their festive smash is a surprise but a welcome one, a charmed piece of work which opens on those inevitable sleigh bells, the calling card of a band not quite comfortable with the season.  

Those bass-driven joys of Christmas Will Break Your Heart stick out like a jagged edge. It rips through the softer flourishes Murphy provides with his vocal presence here, the usually soft-spoken touch-up that LCD Soundsystem benefitted from on American Dream. Crucial to any Christmas song is the sense of warmth and languish in equal measure. Think Mud meets Paul McCartney. Christmas Will Break Your Heart sounds nothing like either artist but it grips the often heartbreaking flourishes of the season with such a vigour, an intensity which breaches the heartbreak of the season. Not everyone is surrounded by loved ones and spoilt with hardback editions of sci-fi classics. Some are abandoned, lost to their once close friends and removed from the equation.  

Christmas Will Break Your Heart is an obvious LCD Soundsystem song. It has the high rise of tempo towards the end, the crash and burn of a man desperately gripping what he can of the season and still coming up short. Festive cheer does not suspend the anxieties and everyday challenges. The world is small yet blissfully unaware of most individuals and this, more than anything, crushes the charm of a holiday seemingly peddled by excess. Christmas Will Break Your Heart has some of the similar hangups heard on This is Happening, this fear of getting old in the face of new blood on the hunt for those older acts struggling to keep pace. A decade on and there is little struggle from those who have been around for decades more than the new generation – if anything they are still pushing the fold and paving the road for those fresh faces.  

But eventually, the frontrunners capitulate, they find themselves flatlining and spiralling from their lofty heights. Christmas Will Break Your Heart is a song of acceptance, a moment of peace in the face of cold fears. What still serves as a shock here is the lack of fundamental LCD Soundsystem bells and whistles. Gone are the electronics, replaced instead by an earnest instrumental and string section, a chance for Murphy and the band to rip the band-aid off, to move away from a sound which defined them for a decade or more. It still defines them but Christmas Will Break Your Heart works through those mundane feelings and hits out with Murphy at his vocal best, a band at their most challenged and all of it forms a unique Christmas song where the angle is not festive cheer but the desire to be seen by your loved ones, to continue being admired at the most wonderful time of the year.