LCD Soundystem’s James Murphy wore many guises in his sold-out concert Sunday at Metro.
At first glance there was James Murphy, Coach Potato Man in a T-shirt, jeans and several days of unshaven stubble; there are aging frat boys passed out on their living-room recliners surrounded by corn chips and beer cans who look more like rock stars. Then there’s the mad scientist. Murphy spent a good part of the 90-minute show twiddling with knobs and adjusting settings on a stage bursting with electronic gadgetry. But above all there was Murphy the punk-disco visionary, the producer-songwriter-singer who fuses the worlds of the mirror ball and the cowbell, who puts a little bit of guitar grunge in the unstoppable groove.
Murphy and five musicians ripped through a handful of singles that have bridged the gap between two insular and usually incompatible societies: dance-club hedonists and indie-rock snobs. An agitated “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House,” a celebratory “North American Scum” and a giddy “Tribulations” surveyed a string of successes that have broken down walls between genres, turned Murphy into an underground star, and landed him a major-label record deal and a recent headlining slot at the Coachella festival in California. Only the breakthrough LCD hit “Losing My Edge” was missing from the set list.
Murphy built songs with an architect’s eye and a connoisseur’s ear: a latticework of rhythms, including plenty of tambourines, shakers and cowbells; repetition that slowly, almost subliminally escalates; tension and release with instruments jumping into the foreground and then dropping out; and choruses that sound like a communal catharsis. His band and programming were equally essential to the process, a marriage of cold machinery and sweat-soaked musicianship that had the room moving in one big shoulder-to-shoulder wave.
The wave was never bigger than for “All My Friends.” The song’s tsunami-like momentum built from a dense piano cluster that suggests the minimalist classical music of Steve Reich and then a few minutes later introduced a stately guitar riff that would make New Order’s Bernard Sumner proud. By the end, Murphy was on top of the wave, riding it with eyes shut, feet stomping the floor, singing about wasted days and what’s left once the wreckage is cleared. “If I could see all my friends tonight,” he sang, turning a demand into a plea.
It was Murphy still making ecstatic dance music, but this time more personal and intimate than ever before. Even the sarcasm in the rare ballad that he saved for last, “New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down,” was shaded by vulnerability. It was a rare glimpse of Murphy as crooner, his heartfelt impersonation of fellow New Jersey native Frank Sinatra, with the disco ball above the stage taking one last slow, melancholy spin around the dance floor.
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greg@gregkot.com
