Bruxxer, Deathbird Earth, Joe Lally + Yanni + Jason K. Trio
Johnny Brenda’s
1201 Frankford Ave.
Philadelphia
March 12, 2026
A few days ago I was walking and talking with a friend and she asked me how I approach writing about music. I said something like, well, I try to mix non-technical, figurative, poetic and sensory language with technical musical terms, or draw comparisons or make analogies, basically. Maybe I’ll think of the texture of the music as mouthfeel, or the blend of consonance and dissonance to sweet and savory… maybe distortion is burnt, or smoky, or charred, or crispy? Loudness is being overwhelmed with flavor? (This is what happens when I start writing before breakfast.) Other times it’s more appropriate to get technical even if the terms elude more casual readers and listeners; I don’t expect everyone to know what I mean if I observe, I don’t know, a preponderance of double-stops or slew limiting distortion or something, but if that piques your interest, all the better! I only know what I know the same way anyone else does: because I heard stuff and looked into it. As with most things, the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know, the sheer impossible vastness of how much there still is to learn and hear.
With last night’s show at Johnny Brenda’s, it’s easier to go totally into the technical and sensory realm because musically, that’s what was served up: no vocals all night aside from Deathbird Earth (which were shouty and subsumed by the sheer volume of everything else, like a voice trapped in a void and desperate to escape – we covered them at Two-Piece Fest; they sounded epic last night). Bruxxer, a trio – Nick Millevoi, Jaeth Devlavrae, Julius Masri – was up first. They’re a new band playing only their second show (no records out yet) but all three have been or are in many others (Nomad War Machine, Desertion Trio, Many Arms, and Zevious, to name a few). They’re self-described, appropriately, as “Mahavishnu Orchestra-meets-Black Flag chaos rock." Big shoes to fill! These are musicians who blur the lines between metal, jazz and progressive rock with aplomb, essentially by pretending the boundaries between genres don’t exist and never did, paying tradition about as much respect as the Kool-Aid Man pays a wall.
Churning like high-speed rail running off the tracks, the band was absolutely shredding right out the gate, with all the defining features: pounding double-kick bass pedal, non-stop legato runs and tremolo-picking bass, and free, forceful, fluid exploration of the full tonal, timbral and register ranges of their instruments. Millevoi – we covered him previously, playing as a duo with Andy Pitcher at Two-Piece Fest – was on fire, switching between a 6- and a 12-string, playing dazzling thrash-inspired technical metal riffs and going on long, unremitting excursions that definitely brought Greg Ginn’s hard-rock need-for-speed scalar solos to mind. When they weren’t collectively generating enough friction to start a wildfire, Millevoi was on the ground, twisting knobs on a Red Panda TENSOR, looping and grabbing and re-sampling sounds.
The stage lights strobed during intense freak-out bits; there was not a lot of space between notes in general, most of the set was kind of an onslaught of sheer audacious playing, punctuated with moments of Arto Lindsay-reminiscent levels of abandon. The actual composed riffs, when they happened, were relatively soothing aberrations, like momentary glitches slowing down a maelstrom-simulating system. “One more song! We’re Bruxxxer!” Devlavrae shouted (funny to think of these as “songs”) before they dove headlong into the last piece, which was marked by so much phaser on the guitar that it was bleeding into the overhead mic’s on the cymbals so that it sounded like they had phaser on them. A psychedelic swirl of sound, a cartoonish (complimentary) sensory overload. In true Philly fashion, chaos reigned. Yum!
