Once Black Flag was a great band, now it’s also a great lawsuit. After a two-decade silence, there are now two versions of the band on the road: Founding guitarist Greg Ginn, who also ran the SST label and owns the band name, leads the official Black Flag with no other familiar faces (Okay, current singer Ron Reyes was in the band for about a week in 1980). Meanwhile three other ‘80s alumni have a rival band called Flag, which is getting higher-profile gigs (including the upcoming Riot Fest in Chicago). Everybody is suing everybody else—even Henry Rollins, the best-known Black Flag singer, who’s not touring in either lineup.

It’s Ginn’s band, the official Black Flag, that hits town this month. Should you care? Well, yes. Because Ginn was really the band’s creative spark, and the one who practically invented the punk-metal fusion. It was Ginn’s idea to take Black Flag away from straight hardcore, slow down the tempos and stretch out the solos, the better to illuminate the angst in the lyrics. The kinship to Black Sabbath was duly noted, but Ginn was drawing more from fusion players like James Blood Ulmer and Sonny Sharrock, and his free-form solos went where few punk guitarists have gone since.

The band have released an online single with the jolly title “Wallow in Despair,” and despite a few snide reviews, it’s grisly and purifying in the band’s tradition. Anything Ginn does is likely to be worth catching, even if everyone else who used to be in Black Flag would probably disagree.