If there’s anyone on this planet who gets to rightly call their new band Murderous Again, it’s Lydia Lunch – she has almost surely murdered at least one person in her lifetime, and more importantly, she has clearly gotten away with it, too. The chance to check out Murderous Again was enough to get me moving on an expectedly disgusting Sunday summer evening here in Philadelphia, the land of no trees, over to South Street’s newest punk dive, Nikki Lopez. (It’s like that Agnostic Front Live At CBGB intro: the bar is named Nikki Lopez and run by a guy also named Nikki Lopez.)

When I write up these gigs, I try to be present for the whole thing, but a late dinner with some of the Murderous Again crew kept us from catching Spiritual Poison, the opening act on what was a four-band package tour. I understand Spiritual Poison to be a male solo project that centers harsh industrial soundscapes and dystopian drones, and while that would have been cool to see, I did get to witness bassist Tim Dahl fret over his choice of two dipping sauces for his wings (from the six available flavors) at the steadily-bougifying Royal Tavern for at least a full five minutes, even with the server right there waiting. (When the revolution comes, it’s the restaurants that charge extra for a side of fries that will burn first.) As it turns out, the air-conditioning system in Nikki Lopez hasn’t been upgraded (or probably even looked at) since the venue was called The Pontiac Grille earlier this century (with stints as JC Dobb’s both before and after – look it up, both Nirvana and Rage Against The Machine played their first Philly shows there!), so the stifling air inside essentially matched the heat-warped blacktop outside. Come to think of it, with all the various transgressive noise performances that have taken place, has any artist ever worked temperature-play into their set? Imagine being blasted with some harsh feedback as the room descends to fifteen below and you’re caught in a t-shirt and shorts, or probably more technically doable, rises to a sauna-like 190°F. That would put Spiritual Poison’s name on the map!

Today Is The Day were on as I walked in, a band that I had been familiar with for decades but never actually heard. The artwork for their 1999 Relapse album In The Eyes Of God was a constant presence at its time, from ads in zines to posters in the record shops I frequented, and the whole thing reeked a little too much of a Dark Horse Comics-style professionalism that I didn’t want mixing in my extreme underground metal. You think I’m a judgmental prick now, imagine me as a teenager! Time has certainly softened my views on the various underground bands I ignored over the years, and I was surprised to see that the current Today Is The Day is a two-piece setup, bandleader Steve Austin on guitars/vocals alongside a drummer who almost certainly still lived with his parents when Today Is The Day were touring in support of In The Eyes Of God. The band has gone through significant changes over the years (I count no fewer than twenty-four ex-members on Discogs), and watching the two of them perform felt like an unintentionally minimal version of what was probably a menacing, pummeling force of sharp-tongued doom-metal back at its peak. Even in this diminished state, I could see the appeal to their songs – Austin’s riffs found common-ground between sludge, stoner, noise and doom, like if that Melvins / Mudhoney bootleg live seven-inch became a sentient being with a Southern Lord contract. One thing’s for sure: Austin himself looked nearly as cool as the other, slightly more famous Steve Austin, sweating through his black, pearl-snap button up, gaunt cheekbones and wild hair looking as though he were John Brannon’s mean skinny cousin who ran away from Texas and needed to feed on something (or someone).

It wasn’t long before Murderous Again took the stage, whose “psycho-ambient jazz noir” was said to meld spoken-word with loosely improvised music. Except, for whatever reason, at the last minute Lydia decided she didn’t want to do that at all, and would instead play through a short set of material from other groups she’s fronted, namely 8 Eyed Spy and Big Sexy Noise. I’ll level with you here: I always assumed something called “Big Sexy Noise” would be decidedly not my thing, that it must be some sort of quasi-edgy cabaret act that goes over big with horny elder European audiences. Amazingly, it’s not that at all – the material she ran through was exquisite stoner space-rock, in league with Pentagram, Skullflower and Hawkwind, not Diamanda Galas or Strawberry Switchblade. Lydia’s a skillful organizer, and the band she assembled for these songs was impeccable – alongside Dahl’s seismic bass activity was Kevin Shea (of Storm & Stress and Mostly Other People Do The Killing) in perfect restrained posture on the drums and Timo Ellis (of, wait, Cibo Matto and Spacehog? Seriously?) on guitar, replete with a pedalboard the size of an AI data center. Shea and Dahl could make any couple of chords sound respectable, but the simplistic space-rock riffs they had to work with were thrilling and downright shocking to my jazz-noir expectations. Lydia was channeling El Duce – not a feminine El Duce, just a straight-up revolting El Duce – when they absolutely ripped through the particularly memorable “Ballin’ The Jack”. I have seen Lydia Lunch perform in a variety of configurations now (including what I would designate as a public solo performance-art aktion wherein she chased a fully-grown guy into the men’s room while singing “snap ya dick!” to the tune of Mystikal’s “Shake Ya Azz” in a bar) and this was easily, far and away, the heaviest and most triumphant set of hers I’ve witnessed.

Prior to the Murderous Again, err Big Sexy Noise(?) set, Lydia asked me if I could find a fan to set on stage, which gave me the quiet authority to walk through the employees-only door and check out the rest of this halfway-repaired venue. I found my way upstairs to the quote-unquote green room, which must’ve been ten degrees hotter and featured three members of Buñuel splayed side-by-side on a couch in silence amidst the asphyxiating lack of ventilation. Vocalist Eugene Robinson was seated at a small desk reading, his impressive physique bursting from a leather vest (and leather shirt), when I quickly explained that Lydia asked to have the sole fan in the green room for herself, hoping that if he refused, I could at least make a break for the door before he got up to dislocate my arms and legs. Instead, he graciously allowed me to snag it, and when I pointed out the obvious hot-as-fuck misery of the room, he said “it builds character” with a winking smile.

I can’t think of anyone who needs to build character less than Eugene Robinson, whose performances with Oxbow are the stuff of legend, on par (and let’s be real, surpassing) Henry Rollins in basically every category (from biceps diameter to crowd-punching to quality of prose), his level of fame tempered in no small part by America’s commitment to racism. Following Oxbow’s sudden and unexpected dissolution, Robinson focused his attention on Buñuel, an avant noise-rock group featuring bassist Andrea Lombardini, drummer Franz Valente and guitarist Xabier Iriondo, three Italians who look like typical metal-head movie extras. Robinson already looks like pretty much nobody else, but he sauntered onto the stage with shiny black electrical tape covering both ears, either as rudimentary hearing protection or further proof that he hails from some other distant planet. The band leaned hard into the experimental aspects of noise-rock songwriting, where the songs themselves consisted more of unexpected starts/stops, segues and discordant freak-outs than actual verse-chorus riffs. Their music centered slippery edges, trap-doors and rocky cliffs as opposed to solid ground, and Robinson vibrated through and over it, gesticulating with muscles and tendons most human bodies never manage to grow, and singing with seemingly no concern over the mic’s proximity to his mouth. The band were tight – a rigid, studious tightness seemed to be a pre-requisite to playing the songs – and Iriondo leaned into Robinson’s weirdness with a dose of his own, often posing statue-like and unblinking for extended periods of time. Playing material from their new Skin Graft full-length, it became common for Iriondo to hold his guitar at an awkward angle and freeze, a comical hypnosis that added to the group’s entertaining presentation. No matter that the audience numbered less than fifty and the air wasn’t really working – Buñuel weren’t playing because it was a savvy career move, self-indulgent ego-boost or sizeable payday, they were on stage because it’s simply where they were meant to be.