Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER
At 9:00 PM on Tuesday night, the players of LCD Soundsystem scrambled through a crowded, labyrinthine metropolis of instrumentation and stage gear to take their places. The last of them — singer and producer James Murphy — emerged to the roar of a Philly Fillmore at max capacity, heightened to a fever pitch of anticipation over six years of waiting since his 2011 “retirement.”
Murphy is arguably one of the unlikeliest late-middle-aged heroes of a rock-n-roll myth. At 47 now, the frontman’s affect and aesthetic is derived from the unique interface between “don’t care” and “doin’ the damned thing,” and kinda makes you wish Phillip Seymour Hoffman were still around to do the biopic because Brendan Gleeson isn’t quite attractive enough. He croons like Morrissey, yelps like Bowie, and screams like Frank Black, over the electronic house hooks perpetrated by his seven other compatriots, at turns twitchy, funky, brutal.
With “Yr City’s A Sucker” off their 2005 debut, LCD reintroduced themselves to 2500 ecstatic millennials, later nodding to a time thirty years ago when the New-Jersey native lived just off of 4th and South, back when your city was his city too. For two solid hours, Murphy and co. weaved the haunting poetry of old favorites like “I Can Change” and the ringing frequencies of “Someone Great” with unsettling new cuts from this year’s American Dream, and landing the first of three consecutive sold-out shows with a four-song encore, under the glow of the bright white lights of their disco ball world. –JOSH PELTA-HELLER