by LORRAINE CARPENTER

It starts in Ronnie Morris's bass and ends in your hips. Drummer Jeff Scheven, guitarists Colwyn Llewellyn-Thomas and Scott Kaija and singer Nirmala Basnayake are equal partners in the controller.controller process, channeling the likes of Joy Division, the Clash and PIL to rock the dancefloor.

"It should be so natural to dance to rock music," says Morris, sitting in a local diner beside his bandmates. Though all distinct, Radio 4, the Rapture and Franz Ferdinand have rocketed from their respective cities with variations on the process, and this Toronto quintet have joined the flock with their red-lit gigs and a debut disc, History. It's an apt title for a record that helps exhume a technique - pairing dance music's structure with guitars and drums - that's been long buried by scene segregation.

"With DJ culture, people got used to going to clubs to dance and going to rock shows and just standing there," Morris opines. "But the DJ thing also made it feel natural for us to base a song on a rhythm and pile melody on top.

"I always had this theory that because guitar rock was totally dead through the early '80s and it was all synth bands like Depeche Mode, it suddenly flipped completely in the late '80 and metal bands dominated completely. Then techno sprung up and there was nothing in between, they were totally separate communities."

Now that they've added their plank to the "disco punk" bridge, controller.controller are constantly being compared to the cool bands of yesteryear (see paragraph one) but, like good twentysomethings, they've got a healthy appreciation for '80s fromage. Well, Morris does.

"I was just listening to the Cult the other day," he says, eating poutine, "and ‘Nirvana' sounds like one of our songs, really. It's got the same sort of swirling, Cure-like guitars and there's a dance beat in there, but no one would ever compare us to the Cult, would they?"

"But they should," a smirking Llewellyn-Thomas pipes in, and Kaija, a part-time music journalist, can't resist adding: "We're a cross between Bon Jovi and the Cult. You know, off the record."

With the Unicorns and Lederhosen Lucil at O Patro Vys on Wednesday, May 12, 8pm, $10

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