Mission's the same whether playing a bar or ICA

"It's very weird that the floor's not sticky - it's not right," joked Mission of Burma drummer Peter Prescott as the band returned for an encore during its matinee performance Sunday at the Institute of Contemporary Art. And so it was weird, at least a little. And not just because of the clean, modernistic lines and sanitary state of the performance space, either.

Punk in the afternoon? Mission of Burma in broad daylight? Before a seated audience politely clasping programs? But there they were, plugged in to their dark dreams and ancient amps and sunshine be damned, doling out dollops of artfully brutal noise against a harbor-view backdrop of Sunday sailboats and toddlers waddling by.

This is what happens when a band becomes a legend, and then becomes a band again. After a 19-year interval, the Boston punk icons returned in 2002 not as an ossified nostalgia act pillaging its history, but as a living, breathing, fearsome thing - seething charisma and essential malevolence miraculously intact.

On its recent albums, 2004's "Onoff- ON" and last year's "The Obliterati," Burma sloughed off the cobwebs of myth, reclaimed its old deranged nobility, and reignited its sense of purpose.

So now, MOB - Prescott, guitarist Roger Miller, bassist Clint Conley, and behind-the-scenes sound engineer Bob Weston (taking over Martin Swope's old post) - plays art spaces and ornate theaters instead of just beer-soaked, burned-out basements. The band's approach, however, hasn't changed one iota.

Making its ICA debut Sunday as part of the institute's contemporary music series, Burma opened with the tumultuous, distortion-corroded "1001 Pleasant Dreams" and then pummeled headlong into the confrontational clang of "2wice," both from "The Obliterati." The group previewed several new songs as well. A highlight was the serrated, Miller-sung "Forget Yourself," which was at once menacing, raw, and complex - much like Burma itself.

"Academy Fight Song" opened the encore and sounded as fierce a call-to-arms as ever, Conley's sneer as sour as vinegar. An exuberantly woolly, sledgehammer-heavy cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Spanish Castle Magic" closed it in a proto-metal blizzard filtered through a punk lens. Mission of Burma, power trio. That sounds about right.

Openers Jonathan Kane's February, a sextet helmed by drummer and Swans cofounder Kane, featured a four-guitar front line in addition to bass and drums. The outfit's all-instrumental, kinetic 45-minute set was powered by sinewy precision, sculpted riffs, and the coiled stealth of a cobra: Pell Mell covering Junior Kimbrough, or Booker T. and the MG's without the organ.