LCD's last stand?

His band had just transformed a grassy field into an ocean of 50,000 bouncing, bobbing bodies. And they did so with only the second song of their set, the smile-widening single "Drunk Girls." If ever there was a moment for James Murphy to act like a rock star, it was then. Instead, the LCD Soundsystem frontman and unlikely king of dance-rock showed off his true character. "I'm sorry for looking like a jerk and wearing these sunglasses," he told the crowd from behind a pair of regular-joe shades at the Austin City Limits Festival two weekends ago. Pointing toward a sunset that lit up the Austin skyline behind the stage like orange Legos, he explained, "There's a midsize star [messing] up my vision." After three consecutively better albums and accompanying tours that consistently made fans out of nonbelievers, Murphy's vision for LCD Soundsystem remains admirably, unnaturally intact. He still makes the kind of organic, punky, smart, danceable rock music that no one else was or still is making, his oft-cited reason for starting the band in 2001. He still crafts the albums mostly by himself and releases them on his own record label. He still has one of the most enthralling live bands around (which makes the solo recordmaking thing sort of weird). And he still looks and dresses like a guy you wouldn't blink at if he were installing your cable TV or debugging your computer at work. Despite this unusually high amount of freedom and low demand to be anything he's not, Murphy apparently isn't satisfied. Or perhaps he has reached the peak of satisfaction. Whatever it is, he is going around declaring LCD Soundsystem's new album, "This Is Happening," the band's final effort. Saturday's show at Roy Wilkins Auditorium could also be the final time LCD plays the Twin Cities.

"It's probably the last time you'll see LCD Soundsystem on a tour like this," keyboardist Nancy Whang clarified by phone Tuesday following the band's concert at the Hollywood Bowl. "You may see 12-inches come out every once in a while and stuff like that, but James wants to work with other bands, and we all have other interests."

An original member of the LCD live lineup along with drummer Pat Mahoney, Whang admitted, "The decision was primarily up to James, since the band is primarily him. But we're kind of all in the same place where it's been really fun and gratifying -- especially this year -- but we're all getting older and have lives, and some of us have kids."

Murphy, 40, explained the decision on NPR's "Fresh Air" in June, saying, "It feels like a good time to stop being a professional band."

"It's a wonderful life. I love being in this band. But to do a band properly does kind of mean you don't really get to do anything else. ... I would like to go back to being just a person who gets to decide what he likes to do and pursues something new once in a while, [instead of] it's going to take me nine months to make the record and then four months of promotion, then I'm going to tour for a year.'"

So what's with this guy, who at once appears laid-back and slacker-ish but also seems insatiably driven and idealistic?

"He's amazing," said Red Wing native Paul Sprangers, whose band Free Energy made its debut album with Murphy as producer.

Murphy seemed like an improbable mentor for Free Energy, a hippie-ish two-guitar rock band that has more in common with T. Rex and Thin Lizzy than New Order or Depeche Mode. Sprangers, however, said the band shared a deep affinity for David Bowie with Murphy. They also connected over a classic, no-frills approach to writing and recording, which he believes is part of the secret to LCD Soundsystem.

"He helped us realize how to distill our ideas, whether it's a song structure or just a guitar lead or lyrics," Sprangers recalled. "His approach is to just distill everything down to its essence and remove anything extraneous. Make everything really clear and direct. That was a new thing for us, but I think you can hear [with LCD] how he really commits to the essence of what you want to say or play, and sticking to it."

That steadfast, whittle-it-down approach flies in the face of all the frilly dance-punk that saturated New York when LCD started in 2001, and that still floods across the pond from England and Europe. Murphy famously made fun of New York poseurs in his band's 2007 masterpiece single "North American Scum" ("New York's the greatest if you get someone to pay your rent"). He still seems to be taking aim at European snobbery in one of the best tracks on the new album, "Pow Pow," in which he sings, "We have a black president and you do not, so shut up."

His smart smart-alecky lyrics and his anti-extraneous recording style have set Murphy apart from his peers, but the quality that seems to endear him to audiences well beyond the dance-rock realm -- a trait that especially comes out onstage, where LCD is far and away at its best -- is that average-guy, uninhibited demeanor.

"Obviously, he has complexities like all of us, but in general he's a very normal guy," Whang confirmed. "There's no guise with any of us on stage. We sort of look like a band of substitute teachers."

On stage at the Austin City Limits Fest, Murphy looked absolutely liberated and anything but self-conscious. He wore an untucked plaid shirt and a scraggly half-beard that altogether looked like he was headed to his corner cafe in Brooklyn for a hangover-curing breakfast. He barely moved during the opening song, "Dance Yrself Clean, " clutching the microphone for such oblique and/or to-the-point lines as, "Everybody's getting younger/It's the end of an era, it's true."

As the music built momentum, so did Murphy. He danced aggressively if not wildly to the juiced-up version of "All My Friends" and moved over to the kit opposite godly drummer Mahoney during the early LCD nugget "Tribulations." But he never quite came off as a showman at the ACL Fest. He maybe never will, either. What showman would pull the plug on his band when its shows were earning such electrified receptions?