Sometimes you’ve got to live with a record for a little while to decide how good it is. Seeing a band live after hearing the record for a while is another way of telling whether the music has staying power. I like the recent record by These New Puritans, Beat Pyramid, but it didn’t really hit me how much the songs had stamped themselves into my nerves until I saw the band doing them live last night (June 14) at Subterranean. It’s not necessarily all that original – they’re yet another band taking a lot of cues from the Fall and Mark E. Smith – but what the heck, I do enjoy it tremendously. This is my kind of dance music. The only disappointments were the fact that These New Puritans played in darkness (making my photographic efforts especially challenging) and that the set was so short. Oh, well, with music like this, a punk-rock sense of brevity may be a strong suit. Singer-guitarist Jack Barnett delivered his rants about numerology and paper with a perfect sense of crazed intensity, and the percussive electronic punk sounds behind him keep the pulse quick and frantic. We also got a nice opening set by The Eternals, doing their funky Afro indie-rock thing, whatever you want to call it, and a not-so-distinguished set by Project Ultra.