The Jesus Lizard singer David Yow shouldn’t be bare – which might be for the most effective. It’s a chilly night time. However the frontman’s lack of nudity is just about the one key aspect lacking from tonight’s ear-ringing encounter with the reunited US band, touring their late-career album Rack (2024). Clad in a black shirt and denims, Yow prowls the stage, spitting, hollering inchoate insights into the microphone, clamping the wire between his enamel, darkly exhorting the group to not cease clapping. He mocks safety handing out “little shot glasses of water” – Yow says it in a child voice – “as a result of somebody could be thirsty”.
Each few songs, Yow launches himself into the viewers, crowd-surfing all the way in which to the blending desk. Much less of a singer than a sui generis declaimer, he smears misanthropic lyrics throughout the grain of Duane Denison’s axle-grinder guitar and David Wm Sims’s malevolent bass. On the again, drummer Mac McNeilly retains up a nimble, pile-driving rhythm that one way or the other manages to swing as nicely.
Yow, now 64, stays certainly one of US underground music’s most storied performers, a grunge-era power of nature – and alcohol – who, in his band’s deranged 90s heyday, spent a good quantity of their gigs stripped to the waist or the ankles, annihilating the fourth wall. (In keeping with legend, he would typically expose his testicles throughout certainly one of Jesus Lizard’s instrumentals, Tight n Shiny.)
His disturbed showmanship was – and stays – in scrumptious distinction to the terse bursts of sound emanating from the remainder of the band. The Jesus Lizard stay a cult act, cropping up solely hardly ever as a reference. In Jordan Peele’s wonderful 2022 sci-fi thriller Nope, one of many foremost characters sports activities a band T-shirt. They haven’t actually had a TikTok second, though the wonderful Seasick, from their 1991 second album, Goat, could be candidate, with its meme-able chorus of: “I can’t swim.”
Nirvana had been huge followers. The 2 outfits shared a producer in the late Steve Albini, who as soon as relayed to Yow that Kurt Cobain would attempt to get him to push what he known as “the Yow button” within the studio. In 1993, the 2 bands launched a break up single collectively, Puss/Oh, the Guilt. Tonight, Yow dedicates Mouth Breather to Albini, who not solely engineered it, however offered the supply materials: a personality assassination of a member of the band Slint who had house-sat, badly, for Albini.
What the Jesus Lizard lacked in selection, they greater than made up for of their single-minded dedication to visceral torque and Yow’s savantish bile. Their attraction by no means fairly translated to larger audiences, regardless of the band’s black humour and a significant label deal in 1995. The Jesus Lizard, part one, fizzled out after their drummer McNeilly left. Yow grew bored with dutifully clocking in for chaos. They received on with their lives. LA-based Yow is a someday actor, visible artist and {photograph} retoucher; the distinguished and professorial-looking Denison leaned in direction of jazz within the Denison/Kimball Trio and now performs in Tomahawk with Religion No Extra’s Mike Patton, who additionally runs the impartial label Ipecac Recordings.
It’s a measure of Yow’s wit in interviews that he refers back to the reunion gigs the Jesus Lizard performed throughout 2008-9 as “re-enactments”. (His gigs together with his different band, Qui, across the similar time, resulted in a collapsed lung.)
Final September, although, noticed the discharge of the primary Jesus Lizard album in 26 years by way of Ipecac. Rack – which cleaves to the band’s custom of four-letter, single-word titles – is a gem amongst reunion data. Enthusiastically that includes the traditional lineup, it slots seamlessly into their discography, satisfyingly acerbic (Yow) and sculptural (Denison and Sims). The concise arpeggios anchoring the majority of late-career tune Alexis Feels Sick are as fist-punching as something within the Jesus Lizard’s early discography.
One replace stands out: Armistice Day marks a dying with writerly grace, bluesy compassion – and creeping dread. “Now the ache is returning,” Yow croons. In latest interviews, he has cited the late singer Lhasa de Sela as an unlikely inspiration. For What If?, one other menacing new slowie, he sits on a seat, later handed to the group and handed over their heads. (“A free stool,” growls Yow.)
Largely, although, the previous reveals itself to be each superb and one other nation. Submit-Covid, you’ll be able to’t assist however flinch in any respect the phlegm Yow sprays round. The lyrics to Puss are actually fairly disagreeable.
However Gladiator stays one of many Jesus Lizard’s most pummelling, heroic calling playing cards, a observe that builds from easy bass, drums and Yow, and climbs in depth. Gladiator II’s soundtrack compilers actually missed a trick by not utilizing it. Denison unleashes a metronomic riff that shifts round with microtonal variations, earlier than McNeilly finds a brand new gear, after which one other.
The reminders of the nice outdated, unhealthy outdated days preserve coming: Then Comes Dudley, with its elegantly needling guitar and – on certainly one of two encores – the minimal noir of Monkey Trick. Nonetheless a defiantly area of interest concern, the Jesus Lizard do exactly nothing tonight to ask in anybody not already contained in the tent. However their fable stays undiminished. And, by the top, Yow is blowing us all kisses.
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