POP MUSIC REVIEW : Primal Elements Power Nitzer Ebb’s Brand of Rock

At first the nouveau Southern ambience of the House of Blues seemed a completely inappropriate setting for Nitzer Ebb, whose stripped-down, industrial-esque rock would seem to be more at home in some stark urban warehouse. But as the strains of Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man” faded from the sound system on Sunday, the English band powered up for “Cherry Blossom,” the opening track from its current album, “Big Hit,” and blasted away the incongruities.

While Douglas McCarthy paced agitatedly and shouted tunefully, the rest of the band hammered out layers of intense, interlocking rhythms with drums, percussion, sampler, bass and guitar (everything becomes a rhythm instrument in this outfit). The mesmerizing grind of mid-tempo numbers such as “In Decline” was every bit as engaging as the high-impact tracks.

Less successful were recent forays into more traditional pop. The couple of ballads seemed utterly lackluster alongside the supercharged syncopation of such Nitzer Ebb classics as “Join in the Chant,” “Getting Closer” and “Control I’m Here,” which sparked waves of fervent moshing in the audience.

Nitzer Ebb may rely a lot on state-of-the-art electronic gear to generate its sound, but what it creates is powered by some of the most primal elements of music.