Just before Crystal Method took the stage at New York's Irving Plaza Friday night, the sea of sleekly clad bodies that filled the venue was bathed in smoky green and blue light, primed for action after viewing the amped-up pornographic video for the Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up." The video, which was released and subsequently banned from television in London in November, features a naked woman racing to escape from her would-be smacker, but its frenetic pace barely prepared the crowd for the explosions that followed.

As shards of white light lanced out from behind them, shot over their heads and pierced the audience, Scott Kirkland and Ken Jordan (a k a the Crystal Method) appeared through billowy smoke at the edge of the stage. Rumbling bass, air raid siren-synthesizer wails and a pounding, militaristically precise hip-hop beat churned the crowd into tense excitement. Kirkland and Jordan silently manned their keyboards, rhythmically bopping their heads and shoulders to "Trip Like I Do," the first song on their new album, "Vegas." Apparently transported by the stuttering lights, the pulsing electro-funk and the ghostly keyboard melodies, the audience launched into a kind of mass vogue dance.

During "Now's the Time," Kirkland began to egg on the audience by hurling around his keyboard (still attached to its stand), leaning into it and crashing down on it in time with the 32nd note, machine gun - style snare drum tears that shattered the air. Around this time, the music began to seem color-coded by section: yellow lights during quiet intros, reds and greens accompanying the boomy, hollow-sounding kicks and crisp, dry snare shots and milky blues and whites during the big blitzkrieg climaxes. By the end of "Keep Hope Alive," the last song of the evening, Kirkland had thrown his keyboard into the air and watched it fall to the stage floor to be tended to by the band's roadie.

Electronica naysayers complain that the genre lacks the intimacy and spontaneity critical to a strong live show, but the crowd eagerly embraced the Method's music -- and not because they feature a frontman with a green, inverse mohawk. Instead, Crystal Method's relentless rhythms, subterranean synthesizer moans, and echoing whirs and flanges all swirl together into what could be the soundtrack of a futuristic vision of nightlife -- a nightlife filled with drama and intensity the Irving Plaza audience clearly craves. Going out clubbing they want music not as an end in itself, but as a jolt of intensity to accompany their own moments in the spotlight. At times, it seemed that spotlight was shining on a warzone.