Dressed down in jeans and T-shirts, Jurassic 5 do not look like most modern hip-hop groups. The Los Angeles band stress the reverence with which they hold rap's roots, and the joy they feel when honouring them - a refreshing antidote to thuggish excess.
The group's name is a self-deprecating joke about their obsession with the music's history, and their shtick is patterned on masters of hip-hop's old school, such as the Cold Crush Brothers and the Treacherous Three.
Their aim is to return rap to an earlier era of innocence, before gunplay and murder eclipsed the uncomplicated joy of beats and rhymes, before the genre lost a lot of its charm. "We're paying homage as well as returning favours," the four emcees rap in unison in Break, and the beaming faces that greet their performance show the strategy works. The rappers - Akil, Soup, Mark 7even and Chali 2na - are joined mid-set by their DJ, Nu-Mark, at a row of school desks equipped with drum machines, to build an increasingly complex beat by tapping on the tabletops. Some of the tricks, such as when Nu-Mark substitutes an old Diamond D instrumental for the band's normal beats during the first verse of Jayou, fly over most heads; even the switch at the end of the set, when the music for A Day at the Races is replaced by the instrumental from Gnarls Barkley's Crazy, passes largely unnoticed.
But J5 are at their best when they stick to the fundamentals, with Nu-Mark manning the decks and the four emcees in a tight knot at the front of the stage, finishing each other's lines and working up a kind of rap harmony, like a hip-hop barbershop quartet. By focusing on rap's essential simplicity, they reconnect the music to its original spirit of feelgood innovation, and provide a potent reminder of what made it so inspirational and exciting in the first place.
· At Newcastle Academy tonight (0870 771 2000). Then touring.
