X: Exene Cervenka, Billy Zoom, Jon Doe, and D.J. Bonebrake, pictured sometime well in advance of their current 31st anniversary tour.

As unabashedly retro, amphetamine-spiked rocksoulpunkabilly two-fers go, you’d be hard-pressed to do better than pioneering Los Angeles punkers X, with garage-rock archeologists the Detroit Cobras on the undercard. Billed as X’s 31st anniversary tour, (though their recorded career began with 1980’s Los Angeles) this greasy double bill pulled into the 9:30 Club Wednesday night for two-and-a-half hours of rocket-fueled Motor City soul and punk.

While X were -- are -- relentless in their speed and aggression, they're Clash-type punks as opposed to Sex Pistols punks; the kind that could actually play, and that had more than a half-hour's worth of memorable songs in them. Their first four albums, from Los Angeles up through 1983’s More Fun in the New World, betray nary a flabby note. Listening to them now, it's easy to hear signs of the genre sidetrips the band would take later, collectively, as solo artists, and in their roots-music alter ego as The Knitters. Much later, someone would think of a name for what X were doing: cowpunk.

If X spiked the rhythmic strut of Johnny Cash's Tennessee Three and married it to the darker lyrical concerns of the Reagan era, the Detroit Cobras (vocalist Rachel Nagy -- who was Winehouse before Amy Winehouse -- and a rotating cast of players) are wholly a throwback. They're not big on original songs, comprising their repertoire almost entirely of obscure rock and soul shoulda-been-classics from the 1950s and '60s. Titus Turner's “Leave My Kitten Alone” is as close to recognizable oldies territory as they get – Nagy swears she didn’t know the Beatles had covered it until after the Cobras had cut their own sharp-clawed version. (“It broke my heart when I found that out,” she said in a Weekend Edition interview last summer.)

The ferocity and grit with which they perform these curiosities protects them against charges of being a nostalgia act, or a novelty act, or anything less than balls-out garage rock act. With a very hot bass player, Carol Schumacher. (They way she dances with her instrument helps. A lot.)

Pictured left: Detroit Cobras singer Rachel Nagy and guitarist Mary Ramirez.

Their rowdy 9:30 set found Nagy in fine voice, leading the five-piece outfit through a 65-minute set that spanned the girl-group skiffle of “(I Wanna Know) What’s Going On” to Betty Thomas’s irreducibly funky “Mean Man” (penned by the great Allen Toussaint) to the bawdy bounce of “Hot Dog (Watch Me Eat)”. (“You got the drinks; I got the buns.”) The latter is actually an original on which Nagy shares credit. But it's still fun to pretend that one, too, is a revived '50s relic that might once have been the soundtrack to a sock hop at Joseph McCarthy High School in Des Moines.

The Cobras do have a number of ballads in their repertoire — Nagy’s heroine is New Orleans soul queen Irma Thomas; at least one tune popularized by Thomas appears on each Cobras album — but they largely eschewed this side Wednesday night in favor of the barn-burners, foreshadowing the relentless pace of the headliners’ set to follow.

X slammed their set open with “You’re Phone’s Off the Hook (But You’re Not)”, the first song on their first album, singer Exene Cervenka’s wailing vocal intertwining with singer/bassist (and for a time, her husband) John Doe's, giving the number a feral immediacy. Cervenka, Doe, and drummer D.J. Bonebreak are all 52 years old; guitarist Billy Zoom is older than that. But by “White Girl”, the third song of a set drawn mainly from those much-beloved first four albums (including Los Angeles almost in its entirety), the band was playing faster, tighter, and harder than on a bootleg I have of them playing at Clutch Cargo's in Detroit -- in 1982!

With his white pompadour and beatific expression, guitarist Billy Zoom looks the way Bill Clinton would probably look now if eight years in a high-stress job hadn't aged him. A lot of rock guitarists and drummers look like they’re in pain onstage; Zoom and Bonebreak look like kids who can’t quite believe what they’re getting away with. Zoom, for all his ferocity and dexterity, moves very little as he plays, in stark visual contrast to Cervenka’s and, especially, Doe’s full-body flailings. It’s weird to hear such a ferocious roar produced by the smallest gestures of a man’s fingers and wrist, but then you remember that that’s pretty much what guitar-playing is. It requires great dexterity but little brawn. Zoom seemed to be engrossed in polite, silent conversation with someone in the crowd for much of the set, mouthing words and raising his eyebrows suggestively. It looked a bit creepy, truth be told, but his sound was monstrous. The flourish he gave to “Hungry Wolf” was emblematic of his effortless style: You couldn’t call it a solo. It was more like a brief squall of perfectly-controlled feedback. Later, on “Breathless”, he let his rockabilly inclinations out to lend some tonal variation to the set.

This little shift felt huge for its rarity. X swings enough to keep them from feeling like a metal band, but their overriding priority is momentum. Zoom performed the entire 85-minute set on one guitar: no swapping, no tuning, no noodling. Whenever a break between songs lasted more than a few seconds, Doe (who opened a pair of shows at the 9:30 for Wilco a few months back) would talk about “stalling for time.” The group was like a shark, or that bus in Speed: Stop for too long and you’re dead.

Beginning their second encore set, Doe strummed an acoustic while he and Cervenka sang his unpretentious State of the Union ballad, “See How We Are”. That’s right: 75 minutes into the show, they broke down and played a ballad. Then Bonebreak and Zoom returned to the stage to race through “The Once Over Twice” and “Devil Doll” before calling it a night.

Another group might have thought to put "See How We Are" and maybe a few more acoustic numbers in the middle of the show, but X are not a band that frets about pacing. This is a group for black-coffee drinkers and red-meat eaters. It hasn’t kept them young, but it’s kept them strong.