Primal Scream Live: Raw, Pounding, Danceable

Rolling over a capacity crowd like some groovy cosmic juggernaut, Glasgow-bred Primal Scream pounded out 90 unrelenting minutes of techno-fueled rock at the House of Blues on Thursday, proving not only that the long-lived group is still kicking, but so is rock ‘n’ roll.

Like that venerable genre, the band has a history of reinventing itself in order to survive. Over the course of 15 years, singer-songwriter Bobby Gillespie and a variety of bandmates have cycled through ‘60s pop, ‘70s Detroit punk and ‘90s blues-rock.

But Thursday’s set offered a slamming blend of rock guitar, electronic beats, punk crunch and funk horns drawn from their current album, “XTRMNTR,” which has been hailed as their finest since 1991’s “Screamadelica,” an acid-house-driven classic of the drug-fueled Manchester era.

Such debauched “Screamadelica” numbers as “Higher Than the Sun” easily held up against the new material’s far more politicized thrashing. Some may doubt the authenticity of this conversion, but Primal Scream’s stance proved as ferocious as Rage Against the Machine’s, if less strident. Such songs as “Swastika Eyes” drove home a political point--something to do with the tyranny of America’s global influence--but Gillespie and company were more inclined to let listeners feel the music’s whipsaw fury rather than sloganeer.

Still, there was no resisting the noisy, grinding, raw danceability of it all, from the pulsing, purple-tinted lights, to throbbing lines from former Stone Roses bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield that sometimes threatened to vanquish the electronic grooves, to the way Gillespie rode the sonic chaos without ever being swept away.

As thoroughly modern as the music was, its sensibility was rooted in an earlier generation of anarchists. This link was nicely underscored during the encore, when former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones joined in on blisteringly tumultuous renditions of the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” and the Stooges’ “No Fun.” Rawk, indeed.