Remember the future?

No, really, remember Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, shiny silver jump-suits and pristine space-discos filled with jive robots and hipster aliens that made the future look like such a happening place in 1982?

If you believe laptop screengazers, this is the future of music, bleeps and squelches and octave-hopping disco basslines all chopped up with Speak N Spell samples and snippets of Kylie Minogue anthems. I have to hand it to Printed Circuit - her giddy mix of electroclash synthpop and chattering IDM is whimsical and entertaining and - gasp - fun! I do not doubt her technical mastery or her ear for a catchy pop tune. What I doubt is that this is the future of music.

It has been suggested that us rockist types are, well, retro-fetishistic to the point of being dinosaurs on the cusp of bloody extinction at the hands of the electro-revolution. But if this is the future, why does it sound - and look, as the elegant chanteuse with the asymmetric blonde bob gets up to do her Don't-You-Want-Me-Baby routine - so much like the Eighties? Retro-fetishism is retro-fetishism whether the past you are glorifying is The Beatles and The Stones or Giorgio Moroder and the Human League. Hello pot, my name is kettle, that's a nice tan.

As Marshmallow Coast take the stage, I am hopeful. It's all the same folks as re-arranged my atoms the previous night as of Montreal, but oh what a difference a songwriter makes. The scent of overwhelming niceness wafts through like stale incense and peppermints. This is shallow, bland stoner-rock, as inoffensive as Bread. Even an ironic Sabbath cover cannot save them.

So far, it's Electronica 1, Rockists 0. Are Capitol K going to make me eat my leather trousers and burn my Velvets records?

Well, not exactly. The last time I saw Capitol K, they were two blokes with a table covered in bits of electronic clobber. Tonight, a guitar case serves as a stand for a laptop sporting a Nirvana sticker; in fact, there are more guitars onstage than computers. Both of them sport shaggy rockboy haircuts, and good god, is that a live rhythm section? There's a guitar-lick whose heaviness would put Deep Purple to shame, the glitchy stutter of Max/MSP booting up, and within thirty seconds, my rockist ass is off its seat, as I pump my fist in the air, shouting "Yes! Yes! Yes! This ROCKS!" And even my IDM-loving Warp-employee housemate is headbanging his dreadlocks around like Beavis to my Butthead.

It's electronica, but electronica as made by LONG-HAIRED DENIM-CLAD GODS FROM PLANET RAWK!!! iMacs and Marshalls in perfect harmony, felching ARP keybass and 7/4 time signatures that would melt the mind of any hip-hop loving disco bunny impressed by a "Funky Drummer" sample. I keep expecting Keith Emerson (ask your granddad) to leap on-stage and start playing laptops with a knife. Because, that's what ELP and King Crimson and all those prog "rock dinosaurs" would have been doing in 1972 had the technology been available.

See, my problem with electro-techno-bores is not even a stylistic one, but a question of philosophy. They imagine a pristine future, a future without dirt, a future without the "past". But we're living in the future - a space age run by computers - and it doesn't look like the shiny glittery Brave New World of Star Trek; it looks like the dystopic steampunk vision of Brazil or Blade Runner. The future has not eradicated the past, it has grown up alongside it side-by-side. Walk through a modern city and you see ultra-modern Bauhausian skyscrapers next to ancient Gothic cathedrals on roads following Medieval streetplans.

This is Capitol K's approach to technology and to music, coaxing theremin noises from emulator software with an old school videogame joystick in a joyous culture-jam that makes The Prodigy look like Jesus Jones. Just listen to Pillow, possibly the single of 2002, a perfect collision of stuttering IDM beatz, lush shoegazer texture, gargantuan monster-rock guitar riffs and fey indie-boy vocals. This is the real Future Pop.

This gig was part of the Track & Field Winter Sprinter. Read reviews of the other shows:
Wednesday, 8th January - of Montreal, Aerospace and Homescience
Tuesday, 7th January - Broken Family Band, Herman Dune and The Mendoza Line