Review: James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem

James Murphy (producer, musician, DJ, record exec, man about town) of LCD Soundsystem is touring China and Japan and played at O’Malley’s Friday night. Super weird venue for James Murphy but okay. It’s not that O’Malley’s is a bad venue–I went to a sort of all-day Rockabilly show there in the courtyard over the summer that worked pretty well–but this was at night, obviously, and I was just really curious as to who had enough guanxi to get the permit for this show since O’Malley’s is in a residential area. But yeah, it was at O’Malleys. Obviously I’m a fan of LCD Soundsystem, because who isn’t? I also wonder if they’re really done or we’re gonna see more LCD stuff in the future. But I was also kind of curious to see what James Murphy would be like just by himself. I mean, I figured it wouldn’t sound like LCD Soundsystem but I really hoped it would sound like LCD Soundsystem. And it didn’t sound like LCD Soundsystem. You know, he was just pretty average as far as DJs go. The music was…you know…alright. Like, I didn’t really have strong feelings about it one way or the other. Not bad, not bad in any way, just…eh. That’s my overall impression: eh.

Plus, there were serious sound issues, to the point where it basically failed and the gig had to be moved indoors about halfway through. And it was so crowded–way too crowded to actually move–so indoors it was obviously worse. So there was no real flow to the night. Plus, if you had dropped a bomb on that place Friday night you would have killed every intern in Shanghai. Interns!

One bright side, though, is that Pet Conspiracy opened for Murphy, and they killed it. I haven’t seen them since Helen Feng left so I wasn’t sure what they were like now, but they were fab. Really cool, electro punk kind of stuff. They’re headlining in a couple of weeks at Mao Livehouse so now I’m really looking forward to that.