Music Picks: R. Kelly, Leonard Cohen, Cat Power

Bleached

THE FONDA Theatre

The Clavin sisters and their band, Bleached, came out guns blazing with two 45s (vinyl records, we mean) and a sound somewhere between the WipersT Wire, The Ramones (in the most primordial, awesome way) and The Shop Assistants. Which means: punk before it got all fossilized and cranky, pop as it should have been if Rough Trade ran the radio. No album yet, but that's OK because this is a band born to communicate through an A-side and a B-side: They know you probably can say in two minutes anything you could say in three, and you probably should make sure at least 30 seconds of that goes to some "ooh-oohs" for a chorus, too. If you've been looking for the perfect thing to paint on the back of your army-surplus jacket ... deeply consider B-L-E-A-C-H-E-D. —Chris Ziegler

Lydia Lunch's Retrovirus

FIDM GRAND HOPE PARK

Singer-poet–performance artist–provocateur Lydia Lunch never did do things nice and easy. From her days in Teenage Jesus and The Jerks, 8 Eyed Spy, 1313 and Shotgun Wedding, her terrain has been the dark, nasty and threatening, a sleazy underground spanning a damp tunnel through ear-drilling No Wave to skanky hard rock to noir-y jazz skronk and some really gruesome psychedelia. Tonight's performance accompanies the exhibition of Cesar Padilla's book Ripped: T-shirts From the Underground (see GoLA). Lunch wrote the introduction, and you have to fear and respect the savage band of like-minded sonic scalawags she's put together to further massacre all the "hits": Swans/Foetus/Pigface monster bassist Algis Kizys, Chrome Cranks/Knoxville Girls/Pussy Galore drummer Bob Bert and Flying Luttenbachers multi-instrumentalist Weasel Walter. This show will be remorseless and pity-free. May God have mercy on our souls. —John Payne