The Jesus Lizard and Lung will be at Bogart's on Thursday, September 26th!
When a band decides to follow up their last album from over 26 years ago? That’s high on testicular fortitude and as dumb as fidget spinners. Yet, when that band is the Jesus Lizard, everything in your pathetic cultural dystopia suddenly falls away and the air smells like Heaven… Their seventh studio album, Rack, produced by Paul Allen, released on September 13 via Ipecac Recordings, features 11 tracks of brisk guitar rock you haven’t heard since… the last time the Jesus Lizard took over a stage in your town. The Jesus Lizard — vocalist David Yow, guitarist Duane Denison, bassist David Wm. Sims, and drummer Mac McNeilly — have returned with a record teeming with the kind of madness needed to beat down today’s AOR mediocrity and piss-perfect pop drivel alike.
Since their inception in Chicago in 1987, the Jesus Lizard has thrilled audiences all over the planet. The impeccable rocket-thrust rhythm section of Sims and McNeilly was the perfect launchpad for Denison’s jagged yet clean-toned riffing and Yow’s mercurial vocalizations manifesting as everything from panicked citizen, reality escapee or wounded sea mammal. The Jesus Lizard’s fury carried on through six studio albums, two live recordings and a brace of singles and EPs.
On Rack, the Jesus Lizard have returned reconstituted, refreshed and positively revving. No tepid, bland tracks to show how they’ve “matured” as songwriters. No inane detours into unnecessary genre exercises. And definitely no weird moves into experimental realms that come off just as contrived and calculated as the top of the Billboard Charts. The opening salvo “Hide & Seek” finds Yow singing/sprechstimming his way with remarkable clarity as his bandmates shore him up with their patented acceleration. The noir vibes coming off of “What If?” is a startling direction for the band, with Yow narrating the action, like he was looking at a random person in an airport lounge and concocting an elaborate backstory about them. The sinister “Alexis Feels Sick” is inspired by Girls Against Boys/Soulside drummer Alexis Fleisig’s guarded opinion of modern life that turns into a treatise of man’s inhumanity to man. “Moto(R)” is playing out of the coolest car tailgating in the parking lot at one of those horrific radio-rock fests. And while we’re on the subject of forcing cool into uncool, “Falling Down” reminds all of us in slightly under three-and-a-half minutes how marvelously badassed the Jesus Lizard has always been, making our fists ball up so tightly they look like the ends of chicken bones.
The Jesus Lizard. They might not be young, but they will never, ever get fucking old.
Lung consists of Kate Wakefield, a classically trained opera singer and cellist, and drummer Daisy Caplan, formerly the bassist of Foxy Shazam. Fierce, ethereal, and heavy as hell, Lung rocks with the intensity of early grunge, layered with sinister undertones. "Our sound is intentionally genre-bending, but the consistent thread is that everything we do has an intensity to it. We mean every word and every note we play, and people can feel that." People can feel that, indeed, as Wakefield runs her cello through distortion pedals and big amps, “I use distortion pedals and plug into large amps that add a lot of depth and color,” says Wakefield: “we treat the cello like a large electric guitar. I write in a way where I can play parts that sound like a bass part as well as a guitar part, to sorta fill out the sound." Caplan pounds out earthquaking beats on epic horn-shaped, vintage North drums. “They aren’t made anymore…they’re fun to track down in the wild and are easy to repair as an amateur (they’re made of fiberglass). I love how they sound with the cello - low and loud with almost no lingering overtones or resonance.” A relentless touring machine, the duo has played over 800 shows across North America and Europe, on bills with Screaming Females, Brainiac, Guided By Voices, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Big Business, Chat Pile, Noun and so many more.
