by DJPAUL205 on 3/30/11Terminal 5 - New YorkRating: 4 out of 5 LCD Soundsystem began their “Farewell Shows” with the first of four straight nights at Terminal 5 in New York City on Monday night. They are calling these T5 shows the funeral march, leading up their “final” show on April 2nd at Madison Square Garden. LCD Soundsystem banged in the first nail into a coffin with authority.
The band played songs from all their albums featuring hits and album tracks over a three hour rock dance fest. LCD had almost the entire crowd on their feet and dancing for the length of the evening. They had an excellent light display and a ton of instruments crammed onto the stage, and the band used ALL of it.
As you can see from the setlist below, the show was broken up into three parts, each lasting about an hour. Part two, (which was apparently titled 45:33) was a 45 minute mostly instrumental jam session with echoes of disco, funk, pop, rock, drum solos, horns and an overdose of light show. Now, while I appreciated the musicality and presentation of all this, after a while, some of it sounded repetitive and never really paid off for me.
Parts One and Three however, were fantastic. The songs really sounded alive and loud. It had a different feel compared to the albums, which makes the live LCD experience excellent. For example, Drunk Girls and Yeah came out like punk songs, I Can Change and Someone Great were slowed down went for a Pink Floyd type feel, and Daft Punk Is Playing At My House sounded like a disco song.
The band had tremendous energy on stage and generally seemed excited to be there last night. Before All My Friends was played frontman James Murphy said, that “This is how this going to work. We’re going away for a minutes so our arms don’t fall off, then we’re going to come back and play for two more hours and you’re going to pretend that we’re aren’t coming back for an encore and by you clapping it’s going to make us come back out.” So there you have the mood of the evening.
Liquid Liquid opened. They sounded like four older guys who were rejected by the Blue Man Group, for good reason.