LCD Soundsystem: When It’s Impossible to Stop Dancing
All the comments about LCD Soundsystem’s latest shows in Europe seem to agree: the band that revolutionized American indie rock is in amazing shape. The energy you can feel in James Murphy and co.’s concerts is certainly nothing new and shouldn’t surprise anyone, but beyond a certain threshold of quality it’s impossible to be truly prepared and despite LCD Soundsystem having been on a “creative break” for about three years – to use Mr. Murphy’s own words – the air you breathe live has a feeling of anything but suspension.
At the Todays Festival in Turin, on the second day in the new venue at Parco della Confluenza, there is tension in the air and not because it is the first Monday after the great summer counter-exodus. It is however a good, activating tension, whose reasons are many: the threat of rain was a sword of Damocles hanging over the park for almost the entire afternoon, LCD arrived from Paris with a two-hour delay, delaying the opening of the gates and you can smell the mass hysteria that is appropriate on the eve of a historic announcement, which everyone knows is the reunion of Oasis. Not exactly a relaxing day, but it is a splendid Monday at the end of August to be a lover of great music and in the end: it is not raining, the delay in the timeline is easily recovered and the handful of t-shirts of the Gallagher brothers’ band that can be seen in the crowd electrifies the air and is a good omen.
The American combo takes a handful of seconds to confirm to the Italian public that the enthusiasm perceived outside our borders is more than justified. You don’t have to wait for the enormous mirrorball that hovers above the heads of the band to come into play to understand that it is a special party, one of those that leaves an indelible mark on the live fabric of the city, but perhaps also on a national level. It is a unique Italian date and to find another appearance in our territory you have to go back six years, to the date of Ferrara in 2018 and then another eight years, again in Ferrara, in 2010. Turin instead welcomes the New Yorkers back seventeen years after their appearance at the historic Traffic Festival as the opening act for Daft Punk, in another unforgettable Italian live page that perhaps cannot be surpassed, but which can and must remain a fundamental term of comparison.
“Us v Them”, with its swirling crescendo that mixes tribal dance and punk-funk, sets the musicians in motion, who, even without looking at each other, seem to act following an orchestra conductor. The implicit and paradoxically anarchic direction is obviously by James Murphy, who in these two decades has perfected his formula using all the ingredients he has managed to find along the way. By the time they get to the administration of “I Can Change” – with an irresistible snippet of Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity” – LCD fans begin to manifest the desired effects. There is a creeping tingling that starts from the chest and reaches the limbs in time with the music. No one in front of the stage can stay still or if they do, it is only for a short moment during which they try to capture an image of that collective in action, and then start again. Stopping dancing seems impossible.
In the studio, the band often fails to escape from the quotationism that has always triggered the usual caustic Sarabanda mechanisms in listeners, which is why they have long found themselves keeping certainties alive, almost never providing surprises. But live, the paradigm is reversed: here, everything has the flavor of a surprise, even for those who have already seen them. Mirrorball aside, there are no stage ideas or distractions. The wow effect is all in the sound, the groove, the technical quality of the musicians. And the punk attitude? It’s not lacking. So much so that as soon as the disco-beats are momentarily put aside in favor of the post-punk revival, people go crazy and even indulge in a bit of healthy crowd-surfing.
When the final “All My Friends” is announced as the last track of the evening, the incredulous faces do not argue about the length – an honest hour and a half – but the absurd perception that the show has just started. That it could start all over again and accompany us all night and the next morning, until the expected announcement of Oasis, and it would be beautiful. We would dance non-stop in the grip of a frenzy that is well suited to the city that never sleeps, where the band comes from. Instead there is no encore and when the crowded stage empties the incredulous faces remain, to hyperbolically demonstrate the amazement that only an exceptional concert can leave.
LCD Soundsystem are a band to see, hear and experience live. Maybe also for this reason the creative pause that leaves “American Dream” (2017) as their last studio effort does not seem to affect their status in any way, nor the excitement that accompanies it. They are the Stephen Curry of indie: you can’t accuse them of always resorting to the three-point solution, if almost every attempt is a decisive basket.
