Great Expectations: The Return of LCD Soundsystem

It’s Monday night and LCD Soundsystem should be going on any minute now, continuing their comeback with the second of a two night test-run at Webster Hall. I’m quick-sipping a lukewarm Bud Light both to pass the time, and to smooth the anxious edge that comes with going to a show alone in your mid-thirties, on a Monday. If it were on a Tuesday, I’d at least be able to annoy my fiancé by repeatedly reminding her with the chorus of “On a Tuesday.” But it’s not. It’s on a Monday.

And while it’s Monday and people are watching Netflix and maybe even ‘chilling’ in the rest of the world, in Webster Hall it might as well be New Year’s Eve. The crowd is already swaying with the silent beat of their collective buzz, the floors are already stickier than a frat party basement at 3AM, and the vaporizers which seem to be almost as abundant as iPhones, are already adding their thin fuzzy haze to the night.

A sound guy walks on stage to check a mic and a low cheer cascades through the crowd. A few minutes later somebody drops a water bottle off by the drums and people celebrate like they’ve got stock in Poland Spring. This isn’t just anticipation, these people have lucked, begged, bought, bargained or in my case convinced an editor to send them to witness a resurrection. To watch one of their favorite bands come back from the dead. And this room is alive with expectations of not just when, but how it’s going to go down.

To a certain degree, bands are defined by expectations. We don’t just expect them to perform the best show we’ve ever seen every night, to produce music often enough to satisfy our insatiable, bordering on unhealthy appetite for media, to entertain us with access to the most intimate moments of their life. We see their best and worst moments replayed and analyzed like the Zapruder film. We spend hours listening to strangers pick them apart on podcasts. We fall headlong into the abyss that is online comments. And we end up creating a narrative in our heads about who they are. Their lives become another TV show to us. And like our favorite shows, we build up our expectations about not only what will, but what should happen next.

So when LCD Soundsystem quit at what some might call the pinnacle of their ten year career, they George R.R. Martin’d us. They killed themselves off in the second act. And the same way George changed the rules when it came to who was safe and who wasn’t by killing off Ned Stark, LCD changed the rules on us. They let us know that no matter how much we might love their band, our love isn’t the only thing they live for. That LCD isn’t a permanent thing we should always expect to be there. And that if their band is going to exist, it’s going to exist on their terms.