Rockin' Our Turntable: The Jesus Lizard

By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 5, 2009 6:20PM

It's hard to overstate the importance of The Jesus Lizard both to Chicago and to their contribution to the music scene in general. Their brutal songs delivered with strangled and smothered screams hitched atop rhythms with human swing and impossibly tricky tempo changes were truly from another world. The band's possibilities were hinted at in singer David Yow and bassist David Wm. Sims' earlier band Scratch Acid, and that work seems like a sketch of things to come. But once you added guitarist Duane Denison and drummer Mac McNeilly into the mix the resulting controlled pandemonium was impossible to resist.

Their output on Touch And Go in the late '90s / early '90s -- Pure, Head, Goat, Liar, and Down -- was engineered by Steve Albini and were the blueprint that countless other bands followed in later years. They've held up as classics from the era, delivering enticing menace that seemed truly unhinged in the time just before the independent rock world got dragged into the mainstream daylight and was left the dry and harden into the largely plastic commodity it is today.

So, to remind people of what dangerous music actually sounded like, Touch And Go is re-releasing those four albums with bonus tracks and a complete remaster by Albini and Bob Weston. Now we admit to usually being suspect of re-issues, often seeing them as an attempt to grab more money out of the fan for an album they already have, but in this case the result is truly glorious.

The remaster gives the songs a deeper audio clarity that maintains the original intent of the music while allowing it to thunder through the speakers a little more heavily. For instance, the drunken lurching of "Seasick" has the power to actually induce nausea, "Puss" feels like a dizzy flurry of noise speeding unchecked through a strobe-lit highway, and "Fly On The Wall" grows into a monolith that teeters over to crunch you under its rhythms. The single version of "Glamorous" -- one of the excellent bonus tracks spread across the re-issues, even shows off, dare we say it, The Jesus Lizard's poppier side?

This is The Jesus Lizard the way they're supposed to be heard. It punches through the hazy mist that has fallen over the band's legacy with the passage of time to reveal a band that is still more furiously enthralling than any of the legions that came after them and made off with bits and pieces of their signature sound. These re-issues are an excellent way to turn new fans onto the band while allowing more familiar ears to rediscover the band once again.

In other Jesus Lizard news, the band will be playing a string of shows at Metro on November 27 and November 28. They're sold out, but if you can find a ticket you do not want to miss this band live.