LCD_SoundsystemsmallWe’ll take James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem anyway we can get him when he appears on Sunday. Several years ago he played one of the airplane hangars at Summer Sonic and reportedly the place is still rattling–I know my teeth are. If it were up to us, we’d have him headlining the White Stage, though there’s always the possibility he’ll get stuck at the Red Marquee since he tends to classify himself as a rock act. Actually, it wouldn’t be too bad if he were mistaken for a dance act and scheduled for the the middle of the night at the RM, but the White Stage around 9 with a huge crowd and a starry sky to close out the weekend. What could be better?

Making the distinction between dance and rock may sound facile but Murphy himself is something of an obsessive. The first thing you notice with you put on the new LCD Soundsystem record, This is Happening, into your computer is that out of 9 cuts (11 on the Japanese edition) 7 are longer than six minutes, and while the length of the tracks has more to do with dance music’s need to build tension over and over again, these songs could have only been created by someone who listens to a lot of mainstream rock radio when he was a kid. Most of his jokes, in fact, seems aimed at fans who are as nerdy about their record collections as he is. Never less than the life of the party, Murphy maintains a stainless steel groove behind his rock-philosopher standup routine, and in the process he creates the best kind of dance music, the kind that sounds like it was made up on the spot, by real human beings. It’s easy to understand why Janet Jackson and Britney Spears once said they were eager to work with him, and even easier to understand why he didn’t want to work with them.