It was Art from Oz weekend at the Academy, where Sunday's Nick Cave performance was preceded by the dance frenzy that is a Pendulum gig, with much sweaty crowd-surfing by the partying youth. If Cave's antecedents are often obvious (as well as effortlessly cool), there is much less originality about the music of the men from Perth. But if it seems you've heard much of their music before, that is very much the point. With a background in dance music production, Pendulum sample the floor-filling sounds of the 80s and 90s and serve it up in the guise of a rock band. Bassist Gareth McGrillen and drummer Paul Kodish are a flesh-and-blood rhythm section and both Rob Swire and Perry ap Gwynedd wear guitar-shaped instruments, even if they rarely sound like stringed, strummed or picked things.

So the riff from Slam is a close relation of Gary Numan's Cars, Blood Sugar sounds like almost anything from the ecstasy-fuelled second summer of love, and their most popular track remains their "remix" (not "cover", note) of The Prodigy's Voodoo People. Of the new material, the hard-rock single is given a perfunctory run through and an intriguing funky instrumental shows an awareness of the legacy of The Meters.

The whole of Pendulum's schtick is a riff on past styles, right down to their onstage posturing, with its echoes of Kraftwerk's marionettes and splay-legged Ramone-isms. It's not pastiche, just vocabulary, and it is a sound that doesn't seem to have a name. With all the attendant light-sticks and hands-in-the-air dancing it should be nu-rave, but that tag's already been used for something else.