Some 4,300 LCD Soundsystem fans drank craft beer or Red Bull and sneaked nips from vaporizing pens. Then they danced. They discoed as if a time machine had transported them to a 2003 warehouse rave, you know, one of those fancy storehouses with bathroom attendants and bottle service.
(For those of you dancin’ queens and kings not so acquainted with such vigorous exercise, that pain in your calves is called delayed onset muscle soreness.)
Though scarcely an inch of the stage is free from extraordinary music-making machines, strobe-light projectors, microphones and sundry electronic producers of sound and light, the guy up front still looks a little like that one disheveled uncle whose name you can’t quite recall at family reunions — that would be James Murphy, founder and frontman of LCD Soundsystem.
Musical artisans breath throbbing, illuminating life into the assemblage of equipment, as Murphy eases into song, voice like an 80s new waver. But there is a palpable storm swelling inside that dad bod, and when it bursts, it engulfs the crowd, turning the masses into a single bobbing, arm-flailing blob that elevates several inches above the floors.
Dallas’ Bomb Factory — owned and operated by Lake Highlands’ coolest couple (that I know of, at the moment, that is) Clint and Whitney Barlow, who also brought Deep Ellum’s Trees back to life years ago — provided the quintessential venue for this Monday night party. “Makes me a little nervous, playing on a Monday,” Murphy told fans. But the place was wall-to-wall packed. Sold out.
Up in the rafters, we spotted some well-known Dallas dwellers lucky enough to score a ticket: Tim Cowlishaw of ESPN’s “Around the Horn”; Mavericks analyst Jeff “Skin” Wade; Rodman Shield, executive chef at Common Table … There was linebacker Sean Lee — his fragile thighs and hamstrings resting on a couch, protected from the potential perils associated with hanging in the hive (to the relief of Cowboys fans).
Look, never mind that LCD hosted its retirement party, “a final epic show,” according to Rolling Stone, at Madison Square Garden in 2011 and made a documentary about it. The act’s fourth album American Dream debuted last September and became their first number-one album in America.
Worth a mention: What “Uncle” James said of the encore — that charade of a concert tradition for far too long — was pure bullshit-cutting brilliance: OK, he says, we played a whole bunch of songs. Now we will go off to the bathroom, and then we will return to play a few more.
The final song, “All My Friends,” transformed that magnificently remodeled venue into something like a vivacious body, beautiful and aged (but familiar with a fantastic cosmetic surgeon) and filled with heart and soul and hard-pumping (possibly marijuana-infused) blood.
It was sort of magic; we did feel like his friends, like we all were each others friends.
And when the lights came up, we scurried and pushed, knocked one another down the stairs while shrieking, “Are you kidding me? 11 minutes for a friggin Uber?!”
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