!!!

Before he was a member of this bicoastal dance-punk outfit, drummer John Pugh belonged to the same small but energized Arkansas music scene I did; every time the pre-Pugh !!! would come to Little Rock, we'd throw a dance party raucous enough to attract the cops but good-natured enough to compel them to watch instead of shut it down. Currently ensconced in a healthy New York scene of like-minded pleasure-seekers -- outfits like LCD Soundsystem, the Rapture, and sister group Out Hud -- !!! can play larger spaces than the riverside gazebo it used to pack those many summers ago. But on Louden Up Now, its debut album after a mini-LP and a handful of singles, it proves that the attention hasn't affected !!!'s true-blue mission: to help correct indie rock's long-standing lack of rhythmic flexibility. Every tune here throbs with motion, supplied by Pugh and the band's three other percussionists, but also by the putatively harmonic voices; the rubber-room bass and sonar-ping saxophone in "Hello? Is This Thing On?" don't exactly accentuate the melody in singer Nic Offer's grunts. Instead, they pack more funk than Superchunk.