New York (AFP) – LCD Soundsystem, the electronic group who became critical favorites in the 2000s before briefly bowing out, embraced their hometown identity as they returned to the big stage in New York.
The group, known for bringing a punk edge and clever wordplay to dance music, played before an enthusiastic crowd of thousands Sunday on the final day of New York’s inaugural Panorama festival.
With a sweaty crowd of thousands swaying before them, frontman James Murphy began by informing he would not be talking much as the band pushed with gusto through its hits.
LCD Soundsystem enthusiastically highlighted is local roots. For the crescendoing “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down,” the stage lit up in a mock Manhattan skyline — with the real one also in sight from the festival on the East River’s Randalls Island.
The group also dusted off its funk-infused cover of “Bye Bye Bayou” by Alan Vega, the chaos-loving punk rock pioneer from the band Suicide who died on July 16.
LCD Soundsystem had also shown love for Vega in one of its best-known songs, “Losing My Edge,” a tale of growing older and losing hipster street credibility.
Murphy in the song offers his bona fides with the line, “I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City” — an apocryphal boast for a singer born in 1970 but one that generated cheers at the festival in light of Vega’s death.
LCD Soundsystem in 2011 had played an epic “last show” at Madison Square Garden that lasted more than three hours and was turned into a documentary.
But the group reunited this year for a series of festivals starting with Coachella in California, one of the world’s most lucrative music events.
– Latest festival for New York –
Sensing a market in the booming live music economy, Coachella’s promoters created Panorama, the second major rock festival on New York’s Randalls Island after homegrown Governors Ball.
Hoping to distinguish itself, Panorama brought in interactive high-tech art installations and, in a Coachella touch, air-conditioned dance stages.
Other acts on Panorama’s final day included Sia, the famously camera-shy Australian songwriter who stood in a far corner with a half-platinum, half-black wig covering her face under a giant bow.
As with her Coachella appearance, Sia left the visual aspect of the music to dancers who emulated her hairstyle.
The performers went from gliding gracefully on stage to mock-fighting and awkwardly contorting their faces as Sia sang in her high-powered, raspy voice including her hits “Chandelier” and “Titanium.”
Hip-hop duo Run the Jewels offered one of the more political sets of the festival, performing their anti-police brutality track “Early.”
“Shout-out to the OG Bernie Sanders,” member Killer Mike said, using affectionate hip-hop slang standing for “original gangsta” to refer to the former presidential candidate.
Killer Mike was a prominent campaigner for the socialist senator and, with Sanders out of the race, he led the crowd in chanting an obscenity against Republican candidate Donald Trump.
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