Live music review: LCD Soundsystem, Sala Barts, Barcelona

How did you feel when you heard James Murphy was getting the band back together? Fittingly, he made a big song and dance about bringing LCD Soundsystem to a close in April 2011. And yet, five years later, they’re back, Murphy having to almost apologise for wanting to ‘Dance Yrself Clean’ all over again.

Yet here at Barcelona’s 1,500-capacity Sala Barts, with no barrier between band and devoted fan, and ahead of a headliner slot at Primavera in the city a couple days later and an Electric Picnic performance in a few months, nobody is concerned about LCD ethics. As they close with an unbelievably joyous ‘All My Friends’, nothing else matters — to steal another song title of theirs to describe the experience, it’s just us and them.

Murphy acts as conductor of this sweaty 90-minute greatest hits show (‘Yeah’, ‘Daft Punk Is Playing at my House,’ ‘Someone Great’, ‘You Wanted A Hit’) , prowling the stage, twiddling knobs, consulting the sound engineer over a persistent niggle, chatting with each band member.

He sips white wine and declares they decided to get a little drunk for the party. After ‘New York I Love You’, as eight of the nine band members leave, Murphy can be seen cracking up as drummer Pat Mahoney won’t let the beat die. The show fleets between rock and rave, keyboardist Gavin Russom dancing like he’s having the time of his life.

However, the impact of ‘Losing my Edge’ has been blunted over the past five years, and the aforementioned ‘New York...’ doesn’t have the same emotional punch it packed with those farewell shows of 2010/11. We heard no new songs.

There is a vague sense that band and crowd, older, wiser, still drunk, are reliving a particularly fun moment of their youth. But after ‘Tribulations’, ‘Movement’, and ‘Home’, and that arms-around-moustachioued-strangers (ahem) experience of ‘All My Friends’, it’s safe to say nobody has filled the void LCD Soundsystem had left behind as best party band in the world.