Oneida, Kinski, Emily Robb
Johnny Brenda’s
1201 Frankford Ave.
Philadelphia
August 10, 2026
It’s not every show that feels almost like you could squint and get a blurry vision of the evolution of rock music, but that was the approximate arc of the gig last night. Let’s begin at the beginning: local guitarist Emily Robb was the first to take the stage, and her performance was entirely instrumental, centered on her electric guitar. Robb played two long pieces, seemingly improvised, that adhered to Lou Reed’s maxim, “One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.” Each piece centered on low droning open strings – the guitar’s cello range – with a looper utilized to keep the pulse going, Robb’s left hand gripping the neck and working around scale patterns, moving vertically through the strings, getting primordial mileage out of what felt like deconstructed Chuck Berry-style rock riffs. (I’d be remiss to not mention the bowed-guitar passage, lest Cale’s role be forgotten.) It was loud, sometimes surf-y, mean and agitated music, and insouciant as fuck, as unguarded as if we were voyeurs to a private bedroom or basement screwing-around session; the pieces didn’t ≈ waver dynamically ≈ much, and contained tons of great, discursive energy, though structures and any attending sense of forward motion felt flimsy.
If Robb’s set was like a constant grappling match, Kinski’s had more of the back-and-forth, offense-defense, attack-and-retreat dynamic force of a prolonged fistfight. The three-piece band (back to their power-trio roots) naturally presented a lot more dynamism and interplay, with music built out of deliberately lopsided forms – eight bars of tension, one bar of false release, repeat – their insistent, active drums and bass setting the stage for fiery guitar work. Kinski’s bassist, like Robb earlier on, utilized a bow at one point, to a mesmerizing droning effect, deep and brutal. The band worked up a frenzy, especially on the last piece of their set, swelling into a marvelous two-chord vamp which included two members of Oneida – a sign of things to come.
Oneida represented the culmination in all this noise: the band was singularly possessed with chaotically propulsive energy and combustive chemistry, a melange of motorik grooves, ecstatic drumming (drummer Kid Millions’s pure manic edge-of-insanity playing is an absolute joy to watch) and hyper, how-many-notes-per-second-can-you-handle keys and guitars. There were furious group-improvised passages that felt like everything barely not falling apart, coalescing in the band snapping back into the original groove – extremely cool, impressive, exciting feats of group interplay and dynamism, all done with casual ease and delicious theatricality. I especially loved the joking song intro “This next one’s also by Oneida,” and the almost earnest, unbraggy way they introduced another by saying “This is a good song, we all like this.” We were then bombarded with a massive, cracklingly-fuzzed-out unison riff between the two guitars, one Sabbath would trade limbs for. I agree: really good song.
