Happy Mondays, Astoria, London

Astoria, London

Anybody who witnessed Happy Mondays' last London gig two years ago would have ridiculed the idea that the band could enjoy a creative rebirth. Bored and bloated, singer Shaun Ryder grunted through a sloppy, cursory greatest-hits set that smacked of a group that had long fallen into terminal decline.

Remarkably, a now-sober Ryder is looking sharper and at least two stone lighter, and Happy Mondays are poised to release Uncle Dysfunktional, their first studio album in 15 years. It is a swirling, brooding jam of a record that owes as much to postpunk art-rock as it does to the euphoric rave-pop of the band's early 1990s heyday.

Tonight's set is divided between new and classic material, but Ryder clearly has different degrees of enthusiasm for these categories. While he stands for new songs like the baleful Cuntry Disco, he mumbles oldies such as Loose Fit and Hallelujah sitting on the drum riser, rousing himself from his torpor only to dismiss them as "cabaret".

Veteran freaky dancer Bez is naturally a more animated presence, brandishing his maracas as he struts across stage with his trademark funky orang-utan lope. Yet even Bez looks a tad nonplussed by the lascivious comeback single Jellybean, whose grotesque lyrical imagery finds his singer hoarsely claiming to be "naked, and a lady".

Ryder remains a gifted gutter-mouth poet, combining attitudinal wordplay and twisted menace on new track Rats With Wings. It's a song about pigeons - a Mondays bête noire ever since the teenage Ryder and Bez poisoned hundreds of them in Manchester in the mid-1980s - and its dark-hued rhythms are nasty, brutish and utterly compelling.

The new material lacks the slivers of quicksilver electro-brilliance of oldies such as Kinky Afro and Step On but gains in lewdness; Uncle Dysfunktional is so sleazy, it almost warrants legal attention. The vengeful and unsettling In the Blood sounds more like a threat than a song and suggests the Fall's fractured art-rock given a house-music makeover.

They close with seismic, juddering 1989 single Wrote for Luck, which as ever sounds like the embodiment of the darkness at the heart of the acid house dream. Happy Mondays are sounding tight, vital and relevant again: it may just be the most unexpected comeback since Lazarus.

· At Beach Party, Portrush, on June 30. Box office: 0870 243 4455.

Contributor

Ian Gittins

The GuardianTramp

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