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Before the start of a
sold-out Metro gig Friday, James Murphy fiddled with the bass drum mike, and
during the show, he often gestured to the soundman or walked over to the
monitor mixer to offer what you have to assume were "constructive
criticisms."
Murphy will always be first and foremost a recording engineer and producer,
more comfortable capturing and polishing sounds than delivering them. But as
the leader of his labor-of-love side project, LCD Soundsystem, he also is an
inspired songwriter, a master of irresistible dance grooves delivered with
punk-rock intensity, and a riveting frontman who pours every ounce of his
being into a performance.
As the co-founder of
Brooklyn's DFA Records and half of a vaunted production team with Tim
Goldsworthy, Murphy has crafted hits for acclaimed underground dance acts
Juan MacLean, the Rapture, UNKLE, Le Tigre and Radio 4. But he has
temporarily left the recording console to support the eponymous Capitol
Records debut by LCD Soundsystem, which features one disc of powerful new
material and another compiling the singles he's recorded for fun in between
production projects.
"Fun" is the key word
here. At age 35, this indie-rock veteran and behind-the-scenes knob-twirler
is clearly having the time of his life in the spotlight at center stage,
performing to the biggest crowds of his career. The fans at Metro cheered
wildly and danced with ecstatic abandon throughout the headliner's set as
Murphy screamed, chanted, twitched and shimmied his way through indelible
club hits such as "Daft Punk Is Playing in My House" and "Yeah."
In interviews, Murphy
describes the touring version of the group the way a weekend warrior talks
about his humble garage band. In fact, the combo was one of the tightest and
most inventive dance-punk/art-rock ensembles I've ever seen, with bassist
Tyler Pope delivering a massive but fluid bottom, keyboardist Nancy Whang
and guitarist Phil Mossman decorating the grooves with a nonstop swirl of
unique sounds, and Pat Mahoney serving as an unrelenting human beat box, as
precise as any computer but with the soul of James Brown's greatest
drummers.
When we talked a few
weeks ago, a road-weary Murphy seemed eager to return to the comforts of his
recording studio. But it will be a serious loss to the music scene if he
doesn't take the occasional busman's holiday by touring with LCD Soundsystem
again in the future, because the show is one that shouldn't be missed.
Opening on the current
tour is another much-hyped club favorite, the British-born Sri Lankan MC
M.I.A. The former Maya Arulpragasam was the darling of the London
underground last year, thanks to her hit "Galang," and her strident though
simplistic political lyrics are building a college-age audience that is just
as enthusiastic here.
But though her debut
album, "Arular," has its pleasures, the buzz isn't justified for M.I.A.'s
live performances.
M.I.A. displayed plenty
of energy dancing about the stage, and her musical partner, Diplo, delivered
an inspired mix of Jamaican dancehall and Southern crunk sounds over which a
better rapper could have shined. But M.I.A.'s cadences were repetitive and
awkward, her voice was so weak that it would have disappeared if every lyric
hadn't been doubled by her dynamic sidekick Cherry, and over the course of a
45-minute set, her predictable bubblegum/sing-song choruses moved from cute
to cloying to downright torturous.
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