Some huge bald guy is stamping my hand at the front door to The Great American Music Hall, and I am thinking, O’Farrell Street has enough sluts, pimps, and exposed genitals to go around. Not that I’m against any of that stuff per se, but all the same, I’m wondering if this place can handle The Rapture — or is there already too much sin lurking around? When The Rapture brings its cock-and-balls style of musical carnage onstage, will fire and brimstone rain from the sky all over our skinny ties and unwashed hair? Needless to say, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

I begin to doubt if I am personally ready for Judgment Day. Then I get shoved in the back and someone hands me a drink, and I think, Hey, it could be worse. I could be bald or from Connecticut, and this could be a Nelly concert.

Next, during the two hours of opening bands, I exercise my right to more cold drinks as I take in the surroundings. For the first set, I look dotingly at the small crowd of delinquents and trust-fund babies bouncing up and down to the synthesized beats and gloomy love lyrics of Owen Ashworth, the lone member of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Sadly enough, he plays his keyboard to a nearly empty venue, as most of the crowd mills around outside, mingling with bums and playing grab-ass with hookers.

With unfortunate timing, people finally begin to file in and pool around the stage just as The Paradise Boys take up their instruments and start to play. What starts at a whisper is in full-blown conversation by their third song: These turds reek of middle school talent show. Remember when those guys spit on Jesus and stuck him to a cross? Well, this band sucks harder. When they start playing Duran Duran covers, I can feel the nails drive home.

Finally, The Paradise Boys pack up their instruments and the crowd murmurs a collective “Thank God” when the four members of The Rapture assume their positions at guitar, bass, saxophone and drums. After a few chords from Luke Jenner’s overdriven guitar, I am awash with relief. As he and bassist Matty Safer screech into their microphones, heads begin to bob in the darkness and arms cross approvingly. Bleak industrial lights run up and down the soaring marble columns and skim across the top of the writhing crowd.

A friend elbows me in the gut and says something into the side of my head. “WHAT?” I scream over the crashing drums of “House of the Jealous Lovers.” “JESUS CHRIST!” he yells back. I give him the thumbs up. This is, after all, what we came to see.

As poster boys of DFA records, The Rapture are de facto frontrunners for the low-tech, no bullshit rock scene radiating from New York City. This puts them in the same unpolished, ass-kicking union as more mainstreamed bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol and Le Tigre. To be perfectly honest with you, it is the wildness and dirtiness of The Rapture’s sound that raises them atop the no-frills indie rock mountain. Also, their music must be played at obscenely loud levels.

Back beneath the highly wrought and complicated balconies of The Great American Musical Hall, The Rapture continue to bang through track after gorgeous track. Jenner comes close to blowing his head open as he wails in “The Pop Song,” and I swear that I see blood pouring out of Safer’s fingers as he yanks the strings of his bass in “Out of the Races and onto the Tracks.”

In fact, my only complaint is that it all ends too soon. While 55-ear-popping minutes has made my brain unravel and helped the crowd levitate in Christian splendor to the ornate ceiling frescoes, I cannot help but feel a little bit used when the show ends so abruptly. This sensation of sluttiness in my soul begins to recede when the band covers Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part Two” in a second encore, but quite honestly, it’s just not the same. What we need is another hour of this shit.