A small crowd gathered outside Jerry’s On Front, par for the course as this rowhouse-sized venue doesn’t offer much space for luxurious indoor banter. What was once in the heart of East Kensington’s no-man’s land, Jerry’s On Front is now buffered by gentrification that wears its cheaply-constructed, ugly-box-shaped heart on its sleeve, but the small venue’s immediate aura is immune to such unpleasantries: friendly, somewhat-aging faces congregate here for rock, psych and avant-garde music generally united by a Philly-style lack of pretentiousness. It was a Tuesday night for an audience that mostly had to work the next morning, so the advertised 8:00 PM showtime was pretty closely honored.

The Shield started off things right, making a bunch of noise on stage that seemed like it might’ve been a preliminary soundcheck only to coalesce into rehearsed material. I love that simple moment, when you’re ambiently listening to a band from outside the venue and it suddenly clicks – we should go in, I think they’re playing! This Philly group was new to me (and not purely because I’m out of touch, as they seem to be less than a year old), an artsy post-punk treat for the steadily-filling room. Bearing traditional rock instrumentation alongside a synth, their sound was spongy and elastic, like Kim’s Sonic Youth songs. Smart stuff, with a garage-y second-nature redolent of Tyvek; the majority of the group were granted wide berths to dick around so long as bassist Sims Hardin didn’t miss any notes. The drummer’s glasses had slipped down to the very tip of his nose by the end of the set, which is always a good sign. I checked out their tape on Bandcamp after the show, and while it was enjoyable, I’m glad I caught them live first – that’s where this stuff clicks.

Up next was the main reason I texted a friend the day before to see if he wanted to go out on a Tuesday night: San Francisco’s Famous Mammals were playing. I had heard that they were good in Boston a night or two before (“it’s like they time-warped from ’79 Sheffield”) in spite of their drum machine dying on stage, a cursed scenario that must keep so many art-punks awake at night. No matter: Jerry’s On Front proprietor Chris Forsyth managed to provide them with a vintage Rhythm Ace, and off to the races they went. I’ve enjoyed their albums a bit (Inscrutable Records’ reissued debut really took my fancy), but they were an absolute delight live. Performing on violin, guitar, bass-guitar and drum machine, all three members took turns singing over a primitive, poppy jangle in league with Desperate Bicycles and The 39 Clocks. All their songs were more or less the same – they could’ve played a hundred of them, I didn’t count – and they were all equally great, a smashing good time. The trio performed side by side with shoulders fully hunched: guitarist Andy Jordan’s unabashed fake British accent took center stage (perfectly spot-on), bassist Stanley Martinez was in charge of clicking the drum machine on and off (he nailed it) and violinist Amber Sermeño added rich, droning strings to fill out the sound (she ruled). It’s thrilling to see a band so in charge of their specific, honed-in sound, performing to a tiny packed room, an experience I strongly recommend. I was bopping in place harder than the band themselves, nestled in the back corner populated with other tall guys considerate to obstruct as few views as possible.

Headlining the gig were Philadelphia’s own Eraser, celebrating the release of their debut LP on the label that more or less defined underground American experimental guitar music in the ’90s and beyond. I don’t have to even say it out loud, but yes, I’m talkin’ Beer City, err, I mean Siltbreeze! Like any good record-release show, Eraser’s family, friends and well-wishers filled the joint, having loud, laugh-filled conversations with and among Eraser before and between the songs that comprised their succinct set. Vocalist Sonam Parikh squealed and shrieked, the full-throttle delivery piercing my ears like I was at Claire’s, and then asked the sound-person to turn up her vocals in the monitors, a move you have to respect. The overall mix was rough and tumble – it’s rare to see a post-punk band where the guitar is the quietest element of the show, and while I don’t think it was by design so much as gleeful amateurism, the band’s obvious joy of being on stage together and flipping the room from neutral to Eraser-owned was a pleasure to witness. And in a true punk-rock move, they played the shortest set and fewest songs of the evening, stomping in and out in a flash.

I’ve been to a fair number of shows at Jerry’s since it opened in those dwindling pre-Covid years, and as I watched Eraser bop to a packed crowd of friends, I reflected on the fact that I had never seen a single person crowd-surf here, or even attempt to and fail. The room is ripe for it – high-enough ceiling, scuffed-up drywalls you can comfortably plant the sole of a boot on, loud rock music in a cramped space – but to my knowledge, this simple act, like a champagne bottle smashed on the stern of a yacht, hasn’t happened (yet). I even asked some buddies there if they had ever seen or heard of it happening inside, noting that it was a fairly common punk-club occurrence, when I was admonished for trying to categorize Jerry’s as a “punk club” in the first place. It’s an “adult DIY” space, I was corrected. For now, if I want to accidentally catch the heel of a Vans Half Cab across the bridge of my nose, I will have to venture elsewhere.

The last time I stepped foot into the Ukie Club, it was for Hollertronix some twenty years ago, the hip-hop DJ night thrown by Low Budget and a pre-fame Diplo (he hadn’t even linked up with M.I.A. yet) where I moshed to fresh-at-the-time anthems like “Still Tippin'” and “Get Low”. It was a moment pulsing with excitement in my life – Clockcleaner’s John Sharkey even punched out some guy outside at the end of the night – yet tonight’s gig felt just as vital, even in my steadily-advancing age. A packed hall of weird youths (and a handful of ex-youths) experiencing the joy of new musical ideas will do that, even when it’s forty degrees and raining outside.

Unlike many of the shows I’ve recently attended, I was actually familiar with the recorded material of Morgan Garrett and YHWH Nailgun, and eager to see both. I also hadn’t yet seen a clear photo of either, and wasn’t sure if Morgan Garrett was the tall redhead in the satin jacket / cropped Juicy Couture hoodie combo, adorned with multiple silver rings (and grill to match) until the music, or glorious absence of music, kicked in. Supported by Jackie McDermott (of Urochromes) on drums and a bald-headed, sleeveless-shirted guitarist named Zach Darrup, Garrett’s set kicked in with startling intensity, the whole room suddenly caught off-guard. Performing over a loud, direct-input backing track, Garrett pantomimed his own voice, screamed silently, gesticulated madly and shuddered as if his pinky ring touched an ungrounded circuit. Wearing his black sunglasses at an unbelievably downward angle, Darrup grimaced madly as he played his electric guitar, the visual strumming rarely corroborating what my ears were hearing. McDermott slammed through Dale Crover-esque fills and beats amidst Garrett’s anti-riffs, resulting in the sound of sludge-metal dropped in one of those landfill trash compactors that gets millions of YouTube views, or a nu-metal as gaseous whale corpse exploding on the shore. The intensity never relented, nor did the ingenuity of the performance, nor did the songs themselves, gleefully dramatic, neurotic and ready to strike. After a few minutes, my show-going buddy commented, “I don’t think he actually sang a single word” – I’m fairly certain Morgan Garrett did, though whether or not that was what I had heard would remain gloriously unclear. It struck me that Garrett and Darrup’s performance conjured a wild, unprecedented weirdness/greatness the likes of which I can only compare to Tom Smith and Rat Bastard in To Live And Shave In LA, whose first No Fun Fest performance shattered the dimensional limits by which I thought music had to abide. I’m going to go crazy if I can’t see Morgan Garrett live again, and soon.

babybaby_explores came next, and I’m honoring their net-speak stylization as I’m still riding high from Morgan Garrett’s stellar performance. This trio comes from Providence, long-running hotbed for weirdo hand-stitched experimental music, and they served that pantheon well. I love when people play drum machines by beating out the pattern in real time with their fingers on its pads (Providence noise-pop weirdos Football Rabbit did exactly that some twenty years ago); babybaby_explores member Ramona Cano-Daly is on her way to an early Carpal Tunnel diagnosis with her rapid-fire, on-the-spot beat-making. Sam M-H played guitar over these beats, ringing-out seasick chords that sounded like cute burps with a little vomit in the back of the throat, and vocalist Lids Bday hopped in place, shouting and squeaking into a mic riddled with the same thick reverb gravy as Extreme Animals (another notable Providence-based “rainbow rock” act from years ago). They had some technical difficulties, which is to be expected when you have that many small electronic boxes linked by easily-malfunctioning cords on a DIY budget, but the crowd didn’t seem to care when they stopped a song halfway through and restarted it, and neither did I. A youngster in a tucked-in “Public Castration Is A Good Idea” Swans tee was going absolutely buck wild a few feet in front of me, next to a couple who danced so furiously in schooled, modern techniques that they’d keep it going a few seconds after a song ended. The crowd was shedding their clothes, but babybaby_explores kept their many layers on, hoodies over capes with a sideways t-shirt improbably tucked in. M-H wore thickly knit, fingerless orange gloves, a bold move for any guitarist in need of their fingers, but this entire show was defined by its bold moves.

The crowd was thick (three hundred people, maybe more?) from the drop, but everyone packed their way up front for the fresh stars YHWH Nailgun (which I learned is pronounced “Yahweh Nailgun”, not with the initials spoken as I was previously doing all boomer-like). Apparently hailing from Philadelphia at some point, but now Brooklyn-based, I had quickly fallen in love with their debut AD 93 twelve-inch, and was excited to see how it worked in person. On stage, the band looked like identical triplets with a bald-beard-glasses guy – you would’ve needed a dozen extra clicks or less to create all four of them in Fallout 4‘s character creation mode. Gangly with home-cut brown hair and the indescript clothes of professional art movers, they sufficiently milled about on stage before Sam Pickard ripped into one of his band-defining rototom rhythms. The music would be dazzling in any circumstance, but vocalist Zack Borzone (second wild n’ weird Zack/h of the night!) pushed the performance into a higher energy field. Looking like Cillian Murphy playing one of The Strokes, Borzone’s sore-throat vocals and high cheekbones pushed an emotional madness to the front of the stage just as often as he popped off to emphasize the rhythms, parts Charles Lavenac of Golden Teacher (the swagger), David Yow (the forehead and throat veins) and Waste Man’s Jack Long (the hoarseness). The crowd was in full throttle, one of those unmitigated nerd-pits full of involuntary thrashing the likes of which I recognized from Lightning Bolt’s national touring post-Ride The Skies. Pickard’s drumming was relentless – Lance Armstrong performance-enhanced by Obolon Premium (the Ukie Club beer of choice) – and the rest of the band, through their purposefully-limited sound palette, absolutely dazzled. An exhilarating moment for all in attendance, I sweated through my Acronym J91-WS from simply buzzing in place, thrilled by the uniquely physical music of YHWH Nailgun and Morgan Garrett. As I exited back up the club’s stairs into the freezing early spring weather and feeling so inspired by what I had witnessed, I could tell others felt the same – if you didn’t already have a band going into this gig, you were desperate to start one on your way out.