All I really needed to know is that Baltimore’s Death Set were playing the Bovine Sex Club at 2am and the bar would still be serving booze for another two hours. ’Nuff said. The only condition to this NXNE nightcap was a half-hour wait in the humid post-storm mist while two hapless bouncers tried to determine who was in a band, who was a VIP and who was simply trying to skeeze into the club. But after having to abandon some early NXNE picks when the heavens opened up — forcing me and a friend to seek refuge under the awning in front of a sketchy hair salon at Kensington and Dundas followed by a drink at Last Temptation — my tolerance for uncontrollable circumstances was as limber as it gets.

The first thing you notice about the Death Set is that two thirds of the band looks to be no older than high-school seniors. But these pseudo-youngsters — in particular singer/guitarist Johnny Siera, with his flat-brimmed baseball cap and snarky introductions and drummer Japhet Landis, who despite his impressive facial hair and insistence that it was his 17th birthday could probably pass for 15 — quickly dispelled their greenness by whipping through a thoroughly polished yet wholly chaotic set. With background samples set to old-school Beastie-styled grooves and other ironic randomness, the trio would jam along half-assedly before bursting into their own hardcore-electro spasms.

What comes across on disc as the bedroom experimentalism of lo-fi beats and speaker-shredded guitars attains fully formed sonic velocity in a place like the Bovine. The narrow, trench-like space renders the musical assault inescapable, channeling all the lose-your-shit energy oozing from the band directly into audience participation. Hell, one of the bartenders actually climbed up on the bar and ordered people to calm down. How often does that happen in a place made out of scrap metal and Jägermeister bottles?

Like the distilled ferocity of their 18-songs-in-25-minutes full-length Worldwide, the Death Set’s set was a mainline dose of irreverent adrenaline — a first taste that’s already left me itching for the next hit.

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