Shut Up and Play the Hits

LCD Soundsystem played their farewell concert at Madison Square Garden on 2 April 2011. It ran close to four hours and gathered the band's whole story into a single night. The film shows that night together with the forty-eight hours around James Murphy: waking up, walking the dog, coming back to the empty arena, seeing the equipment in storage. Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern move between concert film and portrait. The connecting thread is Chuck Klosterman's interview with Murphy, where the question keeps returning to the same place: is ending something at its peak the right decision. The best passage in the film is not the stage but the silence afterwards. The band returned five years later and recorded again, which retrospectively puts the film's apparently final ending somewhere else. Who it's for: LCD Soundsystem listeners and anyone who likes concert films and musician portraits. Who it's not for: The concert passages may feel long to a viewer who does not know the music, and the interview thread starts repeating itself after a point.