At the Commodore Ballroom on Sunday, May 3

“When I saw the future,” sang the Faint’s Todd Fink, “the geeks were right.” The Omaha, Nebraska–based band’s coheadlining Commodore show with Ladytron suggested that maybe the geeks were indeed correct after all. The dweebs who spent the past 25 years fiddling with the oscillators on their Moogs and programming drum patterns on their 808s, convinced they were forging the future of music, might have been onto something all along. There will always be a place for three-chord garage raunch, just as purely electronic music will undoubtedly continue to exist. In their very different ways, however, the Faint and Ladytron showed that something pretty thrilling happens when you bring the two together.

Of the two acts, the Faint delivered the closest thing to a straight-up rock ’n’ roll performance. Under a near-constant assault of fit-inducing strobe lights, the American five-piece danced on a razor’s edge between spazzy electro and jagged guitar-driven rock. The best songs were seamless hybrids, like the aforementioned “The Geeks Were Right”, which welded harmonizing guitars with a disco-jacked beat, and “Mirror Error”, which combined wild synthesizer swoops and a dance-floor-anthem oh-oh-oh refrain.

Fink’s hairline is making a slow retreat and the singer has odd taste in clothing—he wore what looked like a military-issue lab coat—but he’s a compelling enough frontman to make up for the fact that he looks like a high-school science teacher in guyliner.

Ladytron, it must be said, displayed considerably less charisma, but that’s what Ladytron does. The Liverpool band opened its set with the mostly instrumental “Black Cat”, which saw Helen Marnie, Mira Aroyo, and Reuben Wu standing stock-still behind their synth stands like a trio of bank tellers at their wickets, while Daniel Hunt swayed around a bit with his guitar. Ladytron has never been big on stage presence, but it did show a few signs of life. Marnie was the most animated of the bunch. When she was free of keyboard duty, as on “Runaway”, she grabbed her microphone and stalked around the stage, and she even threw her hand in the air during the chorus of “Seventeen”. That might not sound like much, but in the world of Ladytron, it’s the next best thing to stripping down to your bra and panties and doing a Tarzan swing off of the lighting rig.

Marnie was also the only member of the band who dared to wear an item of clothing that wasn’t purchased at Club Monochrome (a short, fringed green poncho, in case you’re curious), and her light-brown pixie bob stood in marked contrast to the others’ uniformly black locks.

Aroyo busted some moves of her own when she had her few turns at the mike. Well, she moved, at any rate. Mostly, though, the Bulgarian-born musician was the very picture of European cool—or icy, Kraftwerk-like detachment, if that’s how you choose to see it. I think it’s charming, in its own awkward way.

The hired guns on drums and bass put considerable heft behind Ladytron’s synthetic layers, boosting the glam groove of “Ghosts” and propelling the pulse of “International Dateline” into “Lust for Life” territory. It made for a powerful, room-filling sound, like what Gary Numan circa Telekon probably thought all popular music would sound like in the 21st century. Not bad for a bunch of geeks.