Retrovirus

It’s interesting to think about early work with respect to the growth, maturity, and/or aging of an artist. It’s a well-known fact that as one ages, one’s palette changes as the physical requirements of playing an instrument shift. Embouchure, speed, and direction of attack are all mutable, even if one’s concept may not be in as much flux. Of course, experience changes the relevance of certain ideas to one’s practice, and one would hope that one isn’t the same person at 50 or 70 when one is at 25 or 35. Perhaps a shift in context has made it increasingly rare that composer/guitarist/poet Lydia Lunch performs earlier work, though the terse atonal vitriol that spewed forth across stuttering rhythms from those early Teenage Jesus & The Jerks sides has “aged” extraordinarily well (ditto her early solo discs and prime collaborations). Now based in Spain, Lunch both affirms and rejects the “grand dame of no wave” (or any such terminology) in Retro Virus, a quartet convened with Weasel Walter (guitar), Algis Kizys (bass, ex-Swans/Foetus), and Bob Bert (drums, ex-Sonic Youth/Pussy Galore). Released on Walter’s ugEXPLODE label, the eponymous Retro Virus was recorded live at Knitting Factory Brooklyn at the close of a November 2012 US tour, and it finds Lunch and company in top form, loosely following the historical arc on a varied program of Lunch originals and versions of Rowland S. Howard’s “Burning Skulls” and Alice Cooper’s “Black Juju,” the latter cast into “Justice is Might” territory (both appeared on the 1991 Shotgun Wedding LP). It’s probably true that few of Lunch’s recent outfits have been as breakneck and taut as this one; Kizys and Bert are pretty much exactly what one would hope for in a sludge-rock rhythm section, pulsing and dogmatic but with a ****-kicking flair. Although better known as a drummer in his own improvisation ensembles and the long-running (and continually evolving, albeit presently inactive) The Flying Luttenbachers, Weasel Walter is a strong and incisive guitarist who has amalgamated such diverse interests as Robert Quine, Blixa Bargeld, Keiji Haino, and Rudolph Grey into a singular and toothy approach, heard to fascinating advantage on the tough “Meltdown Oratorio.” Lunch’s voice is quite a bit lower than it was in the 1970s and 80s (no surprise there), but even if it isn’t the skittering coo one heard in earlier work, her throaty declamations are rangy and physically intense. On “Black JuJu,” she casts breathily upward, perhaps a result of constant needling from Walter’s wiry and keening slide. http://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/lydia-lunch-retro-virus