A shock to his 'System

LCD Soundsystem

Sound of Silver (DFA/EMI)

****

JAMES MURPHY, foreman of the New York electro wrecking crew LCD Soundsystem, is a kind of clubland Lenny Bruce. In songs concocted from whatever's been spilled on the dirty dance floor since punk first went nightclubbing around 1980, Murphy yelps in the voice of a late-night party crasher, smacking the "in" crowd -- post-post-punks, aging club kids, jaded Brooklynites -- with observations that entice and insult. He seems as if he's going off the rails, but the balance he maintains between arrogance and chagrin is as tight as a good punch line.

The satirist's challenge is to stay on that window ledge without plunging into irrelevance or reckless crudity. On "Sound of Silver," the follow-up to LCD's 2004 breakthrough, Murphy succeeds by stretching in two directions -- finding a new musical center, and showing his humanity beyond the laughs.

Brian Eno currently is Murphy's favorite sonic muse. The shiny-headed genius of hybrid pop has long factored into the LCD soundscape, but here his influence abounds.

The first track, "Get Innocuous," is practically a tribute to the Talking Heads-Eno collaboration "I Zimbra" -- it updates that polyrhythmic wake-up call with a snotty, electro-clash female voice chanting, "You can't normalize / Don't it make you feel alive," a phrase equally applicable to sound and nervous systems.

On this cut and throughout "Sound of Silver," Murphy taps into Eno's deep tranquillity, the whimsical calm at the center of his songs, organizing their strange surfaces.

Eno-esque cool comes from understanding that the artist's fatal motivation to play God will always be flummoxed by chance. Murphy, wedding rock roughness to the smoother palette of dance music, invokes this insight by seeking out elements that aggravate as much as they please.

The processed piano that holds "All My Friends" hostage before a kick drum declares this a normal pop song; the off-kilter falsetto that battles with Murphy's flatter intonations in "Time to Get Away"; the title track's queasy dynamics: They startle enough to force a dancer to misstep, or make a listener squirm in her seat.

Murphy uses this subtle, jarring effect to keep his songs from being just one thing; the funny ones always have a dark edge, and the downers gleam with beauty. Wisecracks still abound -- "North American Scum," the fist-pumping rant about cultural tensions on the international dance scene, makes fun of the mimes of Europe and the uptight parents of the USA.