LCD Soundsystem – Someone Great (Helen Chandler guest post)

A friend said to me recently, upon hearing Someone Great in a bar in Dublin at closing time – ‘I remember hearing this song for the first time back in 2007 and just feeling really sad.’ I’m not surprised, I think it’s one of the saddest songs going. ‘There shouldn’t be this ring of silence, but what are the options when someone great is gone?’ If you read that like a sentence and not like a lyric, it would floor you.

The beauty of what James Murphy does is that he makes you forget you’re listening to a sad song. He sets everything to a cleverly-constructed undercurrent of electronic bliss, which means that his songs get played in clubs and listened to in bedrooms in equal measure.

The official video for this song is lovely but the track itself is sped up in it, presumably because it’s the single version. I was loathe to include it here, because I prefer the album version, which takes its time.

/HC