When bands reunite after decades apart, the results can be as invigorating as laying eyes on the long-rotted corpse of someone you love — no matter how much you dry-clean the clothes they were buried in, you just cant trick yourself into believing theyre alive again. Nor should you. For the legendary X, which helped kick-start the LA punk scene in the late 70s with music that still sounds fresh, fertile, and full of promise today, that rule apparently does not apply. Age, it would seem, has done nothing to diminish the bands power. Whether or not it was evident at the time that X first burst onto the scene, there was always more to the bands sound than the raw, singleminded aggression that fueled the majority of its peers. The hidden treasures in Xs vocabulary have aged well, and seeing the band now only highlights the artful flair with which frontwoman (and self-avowed non-musician) Exene Cervenka, guitarist Billy Zoom, co-frontman John Doe, and drummer D.J. Bonebrake turned punk on its head and wedded it to rockabilly, thus creating a hybrid that still endures and warrants interest. Perhaps X has managed to proceed unscathed by the passage of time because the band has never gone away for too long — having gotten back together several times since first going into a slow decay in 1986, and now existing in a perpetual state of on-again, off-again, well-probably-be-back-eventually kind of mode. Of course, it doesnt hurt that X was a blow-the-doors-off live act to begin with (just ask any of the bands contemporaries), but fans should never take appearances for granted. You just never know if this chance to catch X will be your last, and they just dont make em built to last like this any more.
Fri., April 10, 7 p.m.; Sat., April 11, 7 p.m., 2009
