Friday, November 18:
LCD Soundsystem and The Juan Maclean
Kool Haus
I totally thought this show was just going to be a series of DJ sets by members of the DFA roster. It was being held as one of the Return to New York events that I sometimes see advertised around town for the old-school partiers. Whatever I had expected, it certainly wasn’t four dudes in hoods playing drum pads, keyboard guitars and synths and making epic, rocked-out techno jams, which is what The Juan Maclean did with its opening slot.
Until they came on, I wasn’t even entirely sure that I wanted to be there; it had been snowing all day, I was tired, feeling under the weather and decidedly not up for a party that wasn’t even supposed to get started until near midnight. But four minutes of the Juan Maclean set made all of that past history, and an hour of non-stop dancing later, it was completely forgotten.
It wasn’t even immediately clear that the headlining LCD Soundsystem would be able to match the Macleaners’ rump-shaking energy. While James Murphy has dropped some next-level tracks under the LCD moniker, onstage he goes for a live band set up with minimal pre-set electronics, giving the whole thing more of a punk-funk feel than a heavy floor-filling sound. Murphy himself sticks pretty much to singing and leaves the music to the band, which, considering he’s not got the prettiest pipes, is a bit of a daring move.
That, however, would underestimate the show-carrying powers of a burly, boozy and brimming-with-energy front man; Murphy shrieked, stomped and shimmied his way through the proceedings, carrying his tireless bandmates with him on a straight line journey from passable disco-punk at the show’s start straight up to a raucous, balls-out dance party stratosphere at the end. It’s hard to say exactly how he did it, other than having been able to hire a tight-ass band and knowing how to goad them into ever-greater controlled chaos (the technique he seemed to go for on this night was a borderline asshole level of drunkenness, complete with throwing his drummer’s own kit at him).
However he did it, the show was a smash, and the dance floor a sea of hands-up non-stop movement through to the end - which, considering the weather outside and the usual event’s expectations inside, was probably testament enough to the fact that the DFA Records crew knows how to have a party.
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