Henry Barnes 

Shut Up and Play the Hits – review

Maybe this requiem for LCD Soundsystem didn't need to be so reverential, writes Henry Barnes
  
  

Shut Up and Play the Hits
Gorgeously shot … Shut Up and Play the Hits. Photograph: PR

Nobody stops in pop; they reform, repackage and keep on rocking. Props to James Murphy, then, for calling it quits. The LCD Sound-system frontman disbanded his punk-funk ensemble at the height of their powers, playing one last show at Madison Square Gardens in April 2011. Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace's document of that gig is a bittersweet confection – a gorgeously shot concert film that cuts repeatedly between the near-desperate abandon of the show and Murphy, in his apartment the following day, wandering around in his pants and petting the dog. The joke's funny the first time, depressing the second and then a little grating. This is the end of a band, not a career. You wonder if they needed to treat the death of a party with such reverence.

 

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