Live Review: LCD Soundsystem

When LCD Soundsystem crank up, they still make the joyously best kinda dance, kinda rock, kinda disco party going around. Band in place, James Murphy strolls on, dispensing with the just-unfashionable-enough suit jacket even before he reaches that perfectly aged microphone he bellows and cajoles into - between yelling, directing, puzzling and slumping over everything and everyone, particularly the apparently indefatigable Pat Mahoney, as the frontman adds all sorts of rhythmic cross-currents and even more cowbell. They are back from the dead. The five-year 'hiatus' now just a blip.

LCD Soundsystem's opening combination — the clattering near-threat of Yr City's A Sucker — started that enormous mirror ball spinning. Then it was straight into Daft Punk Is Playing At My House and the sold-out Hordern is bounced as everyone did the communal singalong. It was huge, ramshackle, but somehow ran on rails. Not even a breath and it was the mechanical soul of I Can Change. There was an odd confessional humanity sitting among the insistence. But hell, the man can sing! Even Murphy's occasional between-song small talk was polite, if rambling - even when admonishing those damn kids of today: "Thanks for coming, but please - you have a memory, don't watch everything through your screen. Your eyeballs are the sharpest lens of all." How analogue is that?

How does such a nondescript bunch become so hypnotic as they crank up? Murphy bashed out the counter-rhythms, as vintage synths and verge-of-feedback guitars washed over us in slabs and shards. There were newer songs among the favourites: Call The Police nudging You Wanted A Hit, the odd loss of Someone Great and an even newer song which was almost Kraftwerk as it hammered. The singer again distracted by the devices: "Just politely say to that person next to you, 'Don't do that!'" Home was longing, even as that big, er, LCD clock counted away the minutes.

LCD Soundsystem remain a supreme collision of men, women and some old machines.