Given the nature of these things, we really should have got over New York punk-funk by now. Feted by the cognoscenti around 18 months ago - chiefly thanks to The Rapture's miraculous 'House Of Jealous Lovers' - this nervy dance music still seemed destined for only a microscopic revival. Artless opportunists like Radio 4 seemed to confirm the suspicion that this was a once-brilliant music that had been briefly exhumed on a hipster whim, and which would now be quietly forgotten again.
And yet, The Rapture's 'Echoes' album confounded such a sceptical prognosis by transcending the sum of its influences. And yet here are ! playing one of the best gigs London has seen in an extraordinarily good year for live music.
!, we should explain, are a seven-piece from Sacramento, California, currently based, somewhat inevitably, in New York. Their cute name is normally pronounced "Chk! Chk! Chk!", though singer Nic Offer also tries "Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!", "Sh! Sh! Sh!" and, possibly, "Oof! Oof! Oof!" during the fairly brilliant opening jam. That the jam sounds rather like A Certain Ratio's 'Shack Up' gives a broad clue as to where this fluent and gripping band are coming from: epic, multi-percussioned, mightily intense grooves that reference the sound of '80s Manchester as much as '80s New York.
While New York music is often seen as uptight and cooler-than-thou, ! are infectiously, compellingly gauche. In spite of looking like a bunch of impoverished grad students, their attempts at dancing - and at making their audience dance - are funny, uninhibited and entirely successful. Offer, you suspect, couldn't be uptight if he tried. He comes onstage distributing segments of orange to the front row, only to interrupt a song five minutes later to bawl at one punter, "You didn't eat your orange!" His fabulous dancing is something like a cross between Beck in disco mode and a syncopated chimp. Later, he will attempt a Dizzee Rascal impersonation, and gush to the audience, "When I was 15 I never dreamed I'd rock the house to 800 people in London." The fact that he said something similar a few months ago, when his equally fine other band, Outhud, supported Radio 4 at the same venue, makes it no less touching.
Meanwhile, the other six virtuosos in ! flit between guitars, cowbells, horns and keyboards, and often recall the Happy Mondays at their most joyous and flighty. The guitars sometimes sound like insects rubbing their legs together, and at other times like Chic. At some point, in a giant, inspirational version of 'Intensifieder', they're like a cross between Fugazi and Troublefunk. By the end of this one, gangling drummer John Pugh has stagedived, crawled round the venue, made it back to the stage, sung into Offer's arse and told his parents - watching ! for the first time - how much he loves them. Bands have rarely been less austere and self-conscious, happily.
Not much of what they play is recognisable, since the set pivots around songs destined for an album on Warp due sometime in 2004. But this year's fantastic single, 'Me And Giuliani Down By The Schoolyard' (liberation theology with disco replacing Christianity, ostensibly, which references Kenny Loggins' 'Footloose' with a triumphantly unstraight face) provokes a sort of euphoric moshpit and is every bit as good as the extravagant Offer claims. The single proves, too, what anyone who saw even five minutes at this gig would be able to tell you: ! are far too good to be merely fashionable. Hallelujah! as some bloke from Manchester once noted.
