Though former Psychedelic Fur Richard Butler played only two of his old band's songs during a performance with his new group, Love Spit Love, the crowd greeted him with an enthusiasm rarely displayed for well-known singers fronting new projects. It had good reason to do so: Most of the songs on the outfit's second album, "Trysome Eatone," are as strong as anything on the last few Furs records. (But though Butler's appeal hasn't waned in intensity, it has become "more selective": the Sunday night show was moved at the last minute to the Aerosmith-owned Mama Kin Music Hall from a much larger venue.)

\\"I know what's dead is done," Butler sang during the concert opener, "More Than Money," but the band's densely roiling sound and its frontman's array of dramatic gestures and familiar poses were alive and well. Acting out his highly imagistic lyrics with outstretched arms and fluttering hands, Butler leaned against his microphone stand as if it were a makeshift lamp post and gestured expansively toward the heavens, summoning the rain that has always figured so prominently in his songs. There was also no mistaking the sandpapery sneer that makes clear the singer's stylistic link to both David Bowie and Johnny Rotten (he was drawing out his vowels before Liam Gallagher had even figured out what a vowel was).

\\Introducing the Furs song "I Wanna Sleep With You" with an easy smile and a shrug of his shoulders, Butler suddenly tore into the proposition with a serrated voice that evoked his old, leering, bilious voice. And while the Roxy Music-style horns that fueled the Furs are long gone, still intact was Butler's embrace of Roxy's lounge-glam sensibility and his soft spot for the bittersweet pop song -- a gutsy stance in fiercely post-punk years like 1980).

\\Butler also offered lovely readings of a pair of new compositions -- "Fall On Tears" and "It Hurts When I Laugh" -- that held their own against the fifteen-year-old Furs ballad he trotted out during the encore: a starkly tender version of "Love My Way." Sung against only the strum of Richard Fort