Atari Teenage Riot, O2 Islington Academy

The last time I saw Atari Teenage Riot play was in a gig venue above a pub some time around 1999 and it was one of the most intense gigs I've ever experienced. Then-member Carl Crack – who would take his own life not long after – was clearly a man on the edge, and the entire group were acting wired, scared and weird. They made the most stupendous racket, and the well-over-capacity audience reacted by leaping about so violently that the building needed structural repairs afterwards. To be part of that seething crowd required commitment, passion and complete obliteration of ego – it was easy to see the power of the cult around ATR's leader, Alec Empire.

Last night, though, the band, reformed in 2009 after several years' break, were playing a purpose-built music venue sponsored by a multinational mobile-phone conglomerate. Their anti-establishment message may have as much urgency as ever with half the planet seemingly in a state of revolutionary foment and “black bloc” anarchists in the news, but the crowd milling around and buying brand-appropriate lager felt rather more conservative than the misfits who rocked up for the gig a decade back.

Watch a clip from the 1999 Brighton gig

Indeed, it may have contained a fair few battle-hardened anarchists, squatters and freaks, but the interactions around the bars and merchandise stall were oddly reminiscent of the most apolitical of underground club events: these were essentially dedicated hedonists loudly renewing acquaintances, boasting about bands they knew and networking like their lives depended on it. It seemed somehow appropriate that ATR are now signed to the Dim Mak label of US electro-house DJ, party guy and friend-to-the-celebrities Steve Aoki: to many of their fans, their music may be ferociously noisy but it is still party music.

That's not to say there wasn't still a passion for ATR or their rhetoric. During the amped-up 1980s electro of the first band on the bill, Kap Bambino, and the oddly subdued drum'n'bass of the support DJs, the atmosphere steadily built in intensity as people shared speculations about how violent the crush was going to be for the main act. But when ATR came on, there was no sense of real chaos in the crowd surge – just a rapid but neat shift towards front centre by those who wanted to experience the band's rage to the fullest.

And that rage was still expressed with real directness. ATR's us-and-them vision of the forces of evil intent on increasing the suffering of the masses lends itself well to barked slogans over crushing electronic beats. Alternating between a rough approximation of Public Enemy's hip hop and the most brutal variants of 1990s rave music – gabba and jungle – Alec Empire, Nic Endo (pictured right) and new member CX KiDTRONiK hollered through layers of distortion and the crowd responded by punching fists in unison and throwing one another around.

The tracks from new album Is This Hyperreal? fit seamlessly with older material, and if there wasn't the sense of imminent collapse or destruction of older shows, it was still a powerful performance. With Empire and Endo all in future-Goth black and KiDTRONiK (pictured below) dressed cyberpunk-style, looking bizarrely like an underworld version of Black Eyed Peas's Will.I.Am, they presented a brilliant visual spectacle, and whipped up the crowd's fervour, frequently making the interaction physical as well as audiovisual by stage-diving and crowd-surfing.

It was all very contained, though, with no sense of the crowd's movement spilling beyond fairly clearly defined boundaries. Empire, previously a ragingly paranoid, confrontational performer actually seemed to bask in the crowd's adoration at points. And when I saw one heavily pierced individual in a “Destroy 2000 Years of Culture” T-shirt standing just feet away from the edge of the mosh pit, checking his Facebook messages on his iPhone, the spell was broken. I also later discovered a friend's mobile was blatantly stolen from his pocket in the mosh pit, no doubt in an act of anarchistic property redistribution. Alec Empire may be a compelling frontman – a post-rave Iggy Pop, perhaps – and offstage a lucid spokesman for many important political causes, and the band may be capable of making the most thrilling digital sound, but in a spiritless corporate venue like the O2 academy the power of ATR's sound and messages just seemed to dissipate.

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Watch the video for ATR's comeback single "Activate"