LCD Soundsystem makes it seem so easy. Most of the New York band’s songs are built around just a couple of chords — sometimes only one, or even none. The songs themselves ebb and flow over on a simple procession of beats, synthesizer bleeps and bass lines, added and subtracted as need be. And leader James Murphy typically barely sings, instead delivering his bon mots in a conversational bark that belies their wit.
Yet Murphy’s casual brilliance, on display at a sold out Metro Wednesday night (one of the group’s few club stops in a summer filled with festival dates), is in approaching his band’s music with the practical scrutiny of a great DJ. He knows just what’s right to keep a song or crowd moving, and he recognizes that near-perfection doesn’t always take very much to achieve.
That’s not to say Murphy and the rest of the group weren’t working hard to make it seem so easy. If DJs just have to drop needles or press play, Murphy has cleverly devised ways to subsume some of his formative influences – Brian Eno, David Bowie, Talking Heads – into a novel, truly kinetic and subtly supple creation. A song like “All I Want,” for example, from the group’s third album “This is Happening,” recalled Bowie’s “Heroes,” at least on is surface, but Murphy and crew’s take on that template crafted different emotional facets from its familiar musical themes. Similarly, if the band’s anthemic “All My Friends” echoed New Order, its undeniable impact was of its own ingenious making.
“Losing My Edge” – a hilarious tongue-in-cheek litany of Murphy’s cool-status-according tastes – may prove he knows his way around rock history, but it’s what Murphy did with that knowledge that separates LCD Soundsystem from many of its would-be peers. Songs such as “Daft Punk is Playing At My House” and “Drunk Girls” were propelled with sweaty punk fervor even if the goal as always was to make people dance, and if “Pow Pow” and “Yeah” were built on the most basic and primal of disco bedrocks, the combined efforts of everyone on stage singing, playing synths or pounding percussion turned them into transcendent anthems. They dared you to sit still, knowing full well resistance was futile.
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