Recap LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip at Roy Wilkins

James Murphy’s got it figured out. The leader of LCD Soundsystem knows that rock fans don’t hate how dance music sounds, just how it looks—the lack of performers to gawk at chafes their quaint conviction that real music is created in real time by real musicians. And so, LCD Soundsystem’s full-throttle Saturday night show at Roy Wilkins offered indie rockers plenty of onstage humans, jabbing at synthesizers and beating on drums, and even heroically manhandling guitars. And that’s not to mention Murphy himself, wandering stoutly about in his rumpled business-casual look, seeing to it that each song is built with the crowd-controlling precision of a DJ performance in miniature.

With “Dance Yrself Clean,” the lead (and best) cut from the latest LCD album, This Is Happening, Murphy established the night’s template immediately: Repetitive keyboard patterns, spare rhythms, and simple melodies expand incrementally, then explode, the sonic pummel augmented by an intense bank of stage lights. He followed this with the second (and second-best) cut from the new disc, “Drunk Girls,” which imagines how “White Light/White Heat” might have sounded if it were about $5 pitchers and Jäger shots rather than amphetamines.

After a set of relentless expand-and-explode, Murphy finished the continuously bouncing crowd off with a sharp threesome of tunes: the defiantly post-verbal “Yeah” (its title, repeated naggingly, is its chorus), the uncharacteristically mournful “Someone Great,” and his first single, the aging hipster lament, “Losing My Edge.” And then, demonstrating one last time his DJ’s sense of pacing, he let the overheated dancers wind down to with the newer, less intense “Home.”

Limited to an opening set, British electro-poppers Hot Chip lacked the luxury to expand as brilliantly as LCD Soundsystem. Yet they not only squeezed 11 songs into their allotted hour, but jammed a bit on steel drums, synths, and miscellaneous percussion. And the visual contrast between tiny, bespectacled Alexis Taylor and large, disheveled Joe Goddard is as striking as the contrast between Taylor’s sweet tenor and Goddard’s harrowed baritone.