Just a quick note to say I checked out Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus performance last night at Drom on Avenue A, with the mignty Art Gray Noizz Quintet opening. Sadly, we missed most of the first opening band, Skull Practitioners, but what little I caught was very cool.
Both the AGNQ and Retrovirus, meanwhile, played some truly amazing sets. I was really excited to finally see the former, and they absolutely did not dissapoint, even throwing in some hallowed Lubricated Goat tunes into the mix as well as an inverted cover of “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” by Bachman Turner Overdrive. Wasn’t expecting that.
Retrovirus, over the past few years, have truly become a force to be reckoned with. While Lydia’s signature brand of invective remains undiminished, when flanked by drummer Bob Bert, bassist Tim Dahl and dynamo guitarist Weasel Walter, there is practically nothing she can’t revisit from her sprawling back catalog that isn’t given a more sonically muscular new life. They didn’t play some of the Eight-Eyed Spy tunes I was hoping for, but they genuinely delivered one of the most cathartic live-music performaces I’ve experienced in loooooooong goddamn time.
While this was my first time in the venue as Drom, the space this all went down in was the basement-level venue that was more recently named Opaline, and – prior to that – a fetid sludge-metal cave, Beowulf.
As an added note, scattered amidst the crowd were various members of SWANS, Live Skull, Fractured Cylinder, the Bush Tetras and even Chet, the former cover star of many an Alice Donut album cover.
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