LCD Soundsystem

Photo by Gary Miller

LCD Soundsystem

If James Murphy had made music in 1976, he'd be a footnote in the criminally underrated genre of disco. With the second decade of another millennium under way, Murphy's LCD Soundsystem surfs atop a wave of adoring press, not to mention an ocean of fans mobbing the ACL main stage. That's a few notches up from the group's 2007 appearance at the festival, when they were young bucks in the Sound of Silver forest: ACL 2010 saw LCDS in the glare of nature's own spotlight, the setting sun. That could be appropriate considering Murphy just told the San Francisco Chronicle that the band will stop touring, but "[w]e're still going to make music." Maybe that's why they played as if the clock was bomb-ticking. LCDS remains a tightly wound mechanism, resounding with metronomic dance-music precision and Murphy as the unlikely everyman frontman with a wicked sense of humor. Throwing down "Dance Yrself Clean" from this year's This Is Happening, the group's nonstop exuberance levitated the crowd, which danced from "Drunk Girls" through "All My Friends" to the lengthy medley throb of "You Wanted a Hit" and "Tribulations." This disco not only doesn't suck, it's modern brilliance.