The original Pitchfork review, 2007:
9.2, Best New Music
James Murphy started releasing dance music some time between "B.O.B." and "Get Ur Freak On". It was a golden age for modern pop, a period during which a lot of personal aesthetics crumbled. Indie wasn't a dirty word, but it was a meaningless one. Pop, though, wasn't just more meaningless, it was more everything. And for the first time in a long while, pop also had its evangelicals; people who could argue convincingly in its favor, and who knew how to contextualize it interestingly. That turnover period was an exciting time; the ideological tension, the feeling that something was at stake, the exuberance of redrawing your bounds. The habitual mixtape maker in your life probably remembers it well.
Despite eventually remixing Britney Spears and N.E.R.D., Murphy never had a hands-on relationship with pop. Nonetheless, his transition out of punk and into dance music ran concurrent with this modest revolution, and it's pretty much impossible to separate his epiphanies from ours. That early LCD tracks like "Losing My Edge" used to feature in playlists alongside, say, "Work It" or "...Baby One More Time" only reinforces the link. So it's fitting that the
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