After starting the evening at a house with a wonderfully bizarre “Grandpa’s Lounge” pouring from an abundant supply of homemade absinthe (DANGER! DANGER!), my posse turned up at The Fillmore for the M.I.A / LCD Soundsystem indie festival. But disaster struck right away — we thought there was an opener, but there wasn’t… and we wound up missing M.I.A!!! So much for being on the forefront of today’s music. I’m too busy hangin’ out in Grandpa’s Undergound Clown Lounge to bring you the lowdown on today’s hottest artists.
So anyway, on to LCD Soundsystem. The band was sharp, tight and surprisingly loud. Singer and prime mover James Murphy shook a mean tambourine and provided all the charisma for a band that otherwise had pretty much none. LCD tore through versions of all their greatest hits (all four of them), playing them almost exactly as recorded (but louder). Everybody had a lot of fun, and a surprising number of people were tripping. There’s a whole sociologicial coolhunting exercise that I could do on that, but I think I’ll leave that for someone from Generation Z (or whatever y’all are calling yourselves these days) to suss out that hot potato. Help educate an old Jetta-driving, iPod-wearing indie-yuppie!
OK, but let’s get down to the nitty gritty here. This is a four-year old band. They were fun. The hit songs rule. But for all the time this band has been together, it was barely able to present an hour of its own material, filling out the show with three lengthy covers. Incredibly cool covers, yes; the redoubtable Mr. Murphy can be counted on for that; and for the record they were “Slowdive” by Siouxsie, “Jump Into The Fire” by Harry Nilsson and some Carl Craig song (does it matter which?) that didn’t work all that well.
The covers were a dead giveaway — I’ve got lots of inspiration, but not too many songs, here’s my inspiration, it rules, it’s hepper-than-thous. On the other hand, if you were expecting some obscure hepper-than-thou post-punk touch stone like a Lizzy Mercier-Descloux cover or somesuch, you were instead faced with the surprising choice of a rowdy funk-up by the man who put in the lime in the coconut or in the Coke-you-nut or wherever that lime was going. This cover was actually & exceptionally revealing of LCD’s DNA, showing that the post-punk funk can be traced back to a 1972 track by the “drunk guy who used to hang out with John Lennon.” (Harry was much better than that, but that’s what he’s stuck with.)
In sum, the show rocked, everybody had a good time, but by the time I got home I’d forgotten all about it. Or maybe I couldn’t hear it over the absinthe?
[Soundtrack]
Harry Nilsson – Jump Into The Fire.mp3
LCD Soundsystem – Beat Connection (from Epitonic)
Stream LCD Soundsystem’s debut album in its entirety
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