The Jesus Lizard: Rack – Interview & Album Review

The Jesus Lizard: Rack

(Ipecac)

Out 13th September

LP | CD | DL

Order HERE.

So much more than noise. When Louder Than War discusses Rack, the new album from underground renegades The Jesus Lizard with their guitar player Duane Denison, inevitably it turns into a conversation about the position of the group as representatives of the tumult inherent in the present moment, and the history behind them: a noise of myriad dimensions and levels. A positive noise. An intimate noise. A noise shared between comrades. Interview with Ryan Walker.

”Someone once told me the worst thing you can do is be pretentious. To me the worst thing you can do in a band is be dull’’ – Duane Denison, The Jesus Lizard, 2024.

People have been waiting.

28-years.

When the Jesus Lizard announced their new album, Rack, on Ipacec Records alongside single Hide & Seek on June 5th this year with the original line-up of David Yow, Duane Denison, David Wm. Sims and Mac McNeilly, the stage was finally primed for the return of the weird kids which, unwillingly or not – came back into our lives as crowned kings of a certain poised permutation of deformed rock music, a signal direct from the spirit of infidels: ‘noise’ – the 90s deemed it.

A ‘noise’ yes, and an undoubted, even unparalleled one at that. Recognition of the Jesus Lizards’ orientation in underground culture is an obvious, and unnecessary use of praise (this fact is something we have, and must always – recognise). Recognition again of their separation from a dark, burgeoning strand of post-punk music belonging to a particular vintage contingent- but preferred to orbit around the then watershed countercultre of the time with their very own gnawing joyride of asymmetrical noise is no less unnecessary despite the known accomplices that came along with it.

”It definitely feels more like an event. I was working pretty steadily doing other things with other bands for a long time. But obviously this is different” Denison states from his home in Texas. “When you’re putting them out every year and touring all the time – you kind of take it for granted. Hopefully it’s a big deal’’.

The Jesus Lizard aren’t a band that takes it for granted. They’re the same guys. Mistaken for mechanics. Not just stripped to the waist but stripped to the skeleton below the wounded skin. Bloody wires and beer-soaked bones. Band t-shirts for body armour. A keen interest in being unconcerned with what people thought of them – nothing beyond, or smaller than, the outlook and radius of the unit is what mattered. They continue to change. Adapt. Diversity between the streams. But also mirror and representation of the world around us, collapsing into a vortex chaos with our legs along with it.

”We had started playing again in 2009 – went out into the world, stepped off, everybody went back to doing other things. Then we started playing again. 2017, 2018. For me, as much as anything, I just wanted some new songs to play live’’ Denison tells me. ”It seemed like people were still happy to see us. We still sounded good…great I think sometimes together. It seemed natural. It took people a while to get everyone on board with that idea, but once we did there was no turning back’’.

Upon passing the point of no return, the band quickly established a sense of what songs would make up the bulk of the album. “To me”, Denison believes “you can usually tell pretty quickly when things are happening or not. They weed themselves out naturally. We ask each other: ‘do you really like this one or can we leave it behind?’ We don’t waste time. They don’t improve overtime. You overwork them. You beat it up. You’ve worked it so much you like it even less now”.

Having ripped up those infernal weeds – what the group have managed to make based on seeing the tunes through various demo processes and stages of development is nothing shy of four horsemen peaking at their playing powers, the same power issued from the chambers of one’s stomach that sucks the skin of your skull in the way it always did, inspiring legions of noiseniks in their wake.

After 28 years of open road, peppered with boobytraps, charged with a fraught musical and political climate with a restless future trying to settle on unclear foundations, a landscape travelled between then and now, anything less than abrasive would be a heinous waste of the abusive grooves then often guillotine audiences with live. Anything less than a confluence of the absurd, the interweaving reels of eerie film music to an imaginative spectacle, a grotesque corner of humour few get, but those few hang their outlook on life upon like a neat little hook in the corridor’s creaking wall – would be a similar deceit of their vision. This is their time.

Hide & Seek, like the experiences of a kinky witch recounted by Yow in the opening verses, sinks its teeth into the side of one’s neck, dragged along a concrete carpet in a heave of hyperventilating rhythms, venomous hisses of napalm guitars, free from feedback, but absolutely furious with its serrated steel edges. Next up, a treatise on man’s barbarous attitude towards each other, the sinister and inhuman, the angular din of Alexis Feels Sick observes a pit within which everything, unified and wired, helps each other out in moments of apparent altruism. Yet, true to the disquieting nature of the subject matter (referencing an opinion of Girls Against Boys member Alexis Fleisberg), everything helps itself to each other. Rats eat rats. A disorienting Yow floating across the floorboards of one’s possessed brain. Spittle sprayed against the hairs of one’s neck. Harrowed barks turning it to a spillage of beans. Denison zaps and flays. Shocks the walls to shapes that flake away. Sharp and crawling along a beam of molten metal. Sims sinking himself deeper into the cavities of the track with uninhibited rumble power.

After 28 years away from putting out an album, the message of the Lizard is one recapitulated according to the context within which it was made, in a language only they can speak. A pestilent demonstration. A poignant sonic force of nature that relishes in the great pleasures and plights of daily life. Their world is a world either everyone gets or nobody understands.

”I kind of feel like, because we’ve all done other things, with varying degrees of success, that we all knew this was different. This was special. This was our thing. We felt very fortunate that we get to do this again. We don’t take it for granted. We were very conscious of not dropping the ball. Putting out something that was dumb or irrelevant” he explains. ”I don’t know what our message is. Maybe we reflect the turbulence of the world around us. We always did. We’re an escape mechanism for it. You can lose your mind in a sea of volume and noise and feedback. When I go to rock shows over the years, usually if I go to see someone, I know someone. In the crew or whatever. Sometimes I don’t and I’m watching and like ‘I haven’t seen anyone scream, a mic stand knocked over or broken’. We haven’t lost sight of that either”.

This is a distilled Jesus Lizard. Perfect. Unwavering. Unassailable. A fortress that crawls. Purposeful. Ripe to wrench the brain out of the times they have found themselves either fighting or floating into with a manual tin opener and show it to the person it belongs to. Flesh into shreds. Today, 2024 is a perfect canvas to comment upon in a way they always did, their albums as a series of encapsulated musings on the zeitgeist but warped and bent according to the filter (or lack thereof) through which they perceived the world around them: the world of America, the world of MTV through which the rest of the world saw America, the world of underground and independent punk culture, the world of each other’s world. Nothing, and everything has changed.

First thing they played together – by the time the band got in the studio, Sims and Denison had been working on material without disclosing anything to David Yow who was, like a lot of people might assume to be the case upon enduring such a leave of absence, concerned about the album being subpar to their distinct run of albums of the 90s that briefly dipped, even devoured some sort of newly hunted mainstream cadaver.

After being about half a dozen sonic sketches into the process of writing a new record and work on, Denison showed Yow a tune with the Lizard in mind as the appropriate vehicle to drive it into the unexpecting heart of their unexpecting fans, old enough to have seen Scratch Acid live, young enough to appreciate their indelible mark upon underground music currently shattering through various states of mutation and waves of revivalism. This apprehensive predisposition that a new record would ruin their past works was soon defeated when Denison showed Yow a demo. ”One day we were sitting around a hotel room”, he says “and I played him something. He said, ‘that’s cool – what are you going to do with it?’ I said ‘I think we should do Jesus Lizard with it that’s what”.

Despite agreeing to enter the studio once more, Yow was still slow on the draw. ”The other guys started getting together and working on songs. We said ‘listen, let’s get the ball rolling and when the train leaves the station, our boy will jump on”.

A workmanlike body of mind and muscle, there’s always been an open dialogue with each other about new material, but inevitably that comes with its own set of irritating conflicts and bemusing episodes. ”We’ve always been pretty honest with each other. With this too. Even in the old days when we lived together. Sometimes we’d look at each other and be like ‘okay, someone has to tell him ‘you’re the only one who likes it’. Sometimes it can get awkward or uncomfortable but that’s the way it is with any group of people working on something. Sometimes people get overruled. With this album in particular it felt like the quality control had to be brutal. Right from the start. We’re gonna be heavily scrutinised. It’s been a long time since we did something and if we’re gonna come out and make this statement, it has to be very strong, and very focused. I think we did and we’ll see”.

The scrutiny? The scrutiny derives from two sources: audience and critic. The Jesus Lizard are an entirely different litter of fans compared to their contemporaries. A band who came along with the conquering of any barricades between audience and artist – yet also came along with the culture that blurred the boundary between the audience and the critic. The press on a local level circulated like that. Information arrived slow and hard. Rather than soft and fast. Difficult to digest. A work of art ripping your fingers to pieces the more your fingers rip its paper to pieces. Yet devout acolytes would often practically live, and virtually die by the outsider ethos inherent in the band which elicits a sensation not a blood cell, anal fissure or bead of sweat short of an ‘all or nothing’ mindset. In order words, this kind of diecast audience member (a critic by daytime, an audience member by night, a fan for eternity) that wants this to be greater, or equal to, what they got in the 90s, from the Albini-engineered 1989’s Pure up through to 1994’s Down.

The second branch of scrutiny of the statement is the lifework of critics. Folks paid to hate. Waiting in the wings of their niche, utopian comment, standing (still standing) in the shadows of the 90s, desperate for it to expire. The 90s that saw rock rip the charts to pieces. Rock went over the top and back under. A Nirvana shaped 90s. Critics are always there. A lingering assassin- occasionally set to stun, occasionally hibernating in slippers behind the protection of a laptop. Afraid to be wrong. Virgin critics. ”Confused between Bad Brains and a bad mood’’ and ”at least it makes the bistro scene seem coherent” said one article, and even comparing them to the Spice Girls in terms of their adolescent appeal for adults – rather than adolescent music for biological adolescents which, according to the critics, would have been a better album opposed to the Capitol-encouraged experiment they got away with (an experiment featuring the late Andy Gill, mind you). Fuckers. This isn’t for them.

Yet The Jesus Lizard never sell out. Never did. How can they? No amount of group thinking, nor ready-made Alternative Nation tag (or split with Nirvana for that matter on a 1993 release pairing Puss from the 1992 Liar LP with a new track from the Seattle three-piece, Oh, The Guilt) could interrupt their trajectory. Including the projects in between the albums (Flipper, Tomahawk) the roots of their art values were, as they now are – integral to the reason Rack sounds like it could surmount and lacerate yesterday with one kick of its steaming hooves into the crotch of any political rodeo, technological mishap, personal implication or taboo fantasy. The prism through which they peek-a-boo us with is utterly on the nose of the moment – we’re miles away from the 90s. Yet, it still taps our window like a spectre, in the shops, on the shelves, against the sleeves. The everlasting stench of noise rock, arrow through the arsehole, bolt of light in the veins, now a wonderful dashboard of links, local, and international encouragement on online community forums, persists just as much without the noose of victimised superstardom fastened around its neck as the accolades pile up.

With the arrival of Blue, their last album before breaking up, something in the air had shifted. A shift palpable in the circle of the group that just couldn’t adapt to the changing landscapes of style and what trends the direction of subcultural ecosystems were steering towards. The time had come and gone. ”We made an album on Capitol that we thought was good but didn’t do that well so they kept pushing us to experiment and try different things. It was a different era of music. The first half of the 90s, American bands ruled the world. It wasn’t just Nirvana. It was from top to bottom – Chicago, Seattle, etc. It ruled” Denison states. ”The second half – that changed. The English bands took over. As well as hip-hop and electronica. We were not the exciting new thing anymore. Everyone else who came in with us slowly started to see themselves as high and dry. The label encouraged us to experiment and that’s what we did. Some fans thought it was too weird when we used samples and things. The label thought we hadn’t experimented enough. Be more modern. It failed. At that point we just disappeared”.

But the group returned in 2009. With people more than glad to catch them in action. That ‘aggressive sound’ was back too. ”We’re not riding the coattails of our own influence. It just worked out” Denison adds.

After the compulsive convulsions of Armistice Day, all soil-sputtering dirge as Sims lives to kick holes in a fortress of concrete by song’s second minute, the frenetic anti-solos teeming from Grind bulldozes one’s ribcage to pieces in a deathly, urgent crush. The sonic equivalent of having tweezers applied to a splinter embedded in one’s finger, but ends up whipping the tip clean off. McNeilly meanwhile reloading the rhythmic artillery attack with Denison playing the space with extractor fan textures faintly fizzing through a radio receiver rather than mortal notes in a spellbinding flux of combative thrash and intermittent toggle-switches of static incantations: staircases that neither descend, or ascend, ghost notes that identify, hover, and strike in one swift surprise. Soon behind, with a quieter feel, What If? shimmers and snakes across the room in a dazzling battle of hallucinatory guitars, all spider acid threads and surging bass gurgles close to a psychotic episode and then finally – a state of catatonia: what if they’d left, gotten loaded, and she turned out to be a thief?’ Yow asks us in a whisper than whips us the backs of our necks to pieces’, constantly surrounding the same looped amusement: ‘a liar? a murderer? a psychopath?’ and succumbs to the eternal state of irresistibility: ‘I’ve always wandered’. Woozily wandering along intricate lattices of wiry noise crawl up Yow’s trouser leg – a sombre intonation, a depraved monologue of intense self-immolation spoken into the core of a wall with nothing but the leaky tap in the tank attached to it as a form of companionship.

Do they care? About themselves and their people – the real critics all along. Sure. Their work is their life. Does it matter? No. But the suspicion of those folks who dare scrutinise a piece of work for scrutiny’s sake (the post-hardcore defendants), especially a sacrament 28 years after they folded up in a recorded form, is a lingering one. It matters. Because the Lizard matters. And the human beings that follow them through to the end – record collecting bastions, old school arbiters and their bastard sons, the tortured love songs of which, for and about them are by written by the rallies of bands a stone’s throw away from each other – yet absolutely idiosyncratic despite this associated genepool.

”We’ve always thought, if we like it, other people will like it. We’re pretty honest with ourselves. I’m not very good at being delusional about things or self-inflating. We’re pretty good at taking the piss out of each other pretty regularly and always have. At the same time, when it comes to say things like films or books, we all kind of know what’s going on and like things that it seems other people seem to like as well. On the cutting edge of things. If we all feel good and we’re excited about it, I feel like we can plug it into whatever the cultural movement and it will find its place. I’ve always felt that. This was no different”.

The Jesus Lizard are a band that never gave a shit – yet after 28 years, people can still get it wrong, there’s a sense of curation here that cannot go amiss. What is the misconception? That they’re the same guys they were back in the day? ”I think they misinterpret things. Or a more common one is they’ll compare it to things that we have nothing in common with and never think about. A tribute to the origin of something that once again, had nothing to do with us. If you don’t like it, fine, I understand. But I don’t feel the need to go out of my way and criticise it. You accept things for what they are. Either it appeals to you or it doesn’t. Having said that, we’ve always got a pretty fair shake from the press – so I can’t complain too much”.

Do they give a shit? About their audience. Yes. About their critics. Again – yes. You can shove a critic into a sack and throw it into a reservoir, glad to have gotten rid of another commissioned complaint with no real reference to the outside world beyond the cum-stains and biscuit crumbs of their ThinkPad. But it can still irk you, as is perfectly reasonable when your band is your life, and the perplexing reviews that surround that work, are far from any sense of musical lucidity or personal rationale. ”It’s funny, even at this point in my life, it still bothers me. It still bothers me if either they don’t get it, or they get it wrong. And I understand someone not liking something, but then I think why are you talking about it then? Why are you even listening to it? Why did they give it to you and not the guy who likes this kind of thing?’’ Denison questions. ”So, it’s just the nature of any sort of artistic commercial release – you hope it gets into the hands of people who are favourably predisposed to this kind of thing”.

Guilty by association – the era of the earthquake the Lizard stretch from can create a ground for hierarchy whether thinking about it or not (as is always the case when speaking about subcultures and undergrounds – the camaraderie is laudable, the reviews of them often misguided and ignorant to what else went on behind the curtains, between the lines). ”With this kind of music, underground or independent, not ‘alternative’ because that meant a commercial catch-all term back in the 90s. There’s a built in subculture and always was. It was built on zines. Flyers. Physical artefacts that were cultural and stylistic. If you liked that band you’d probably read these books, if you read those books, you’d like these movies. It all fit together” states Denison. ”We’re in a time now where the internet is all that thing. Tying things together is more difficult but I guess there comes a point where you don’t think about those things, you just do what you want to do, and plug it in, and see where it goes”.

A focus on those noises can make a man mad – that kind of criticism on the edges can destroy you. The past that bred the likes of the Lizard and a similar supreme ilk of irritated (and irritable) young men reset the passwords without telling anyone – the changing of the gatekeeper either improved, or worsened, what music makes it through the surface – and what music remains underground. Alive yes, but also screaming. Drop your finger anywhere, plug yourself into anything – see what happens. You can download someone’s childhood at your fingertips. You can voyeuristically imagine supplanting yourself in their situational shoes – their experimental scenes, of communes and the various epoxies that kept it all bundled together in one heap of steaming flesh – stripped to the bone, about to blow.

That kind of energy, that rage that could reduce a wall to a pile of bricks, although not so heavily reliant on the ‘physical artefact’ – still squeezes itself into the creases of contemporary music culture, acclimatising to New Old things, and Old New things, on a daily basis with just as much curious fervour as it did when it shattered a ripple throughout America’s noise rock nerd and their ranch posse weaned on Amphetamine Reptile, soon reaching the world’s end a hundred times over.

”You have to ignore it. Just following your muse is ultimately what matters. Being true to yourself and true to that. If everyone in the band is excited about what we were on this album then it’ll find its place. More and more today, artists are expected to participate in social media and internet things, for self-promotional reasons. I understand that. I’m doing it myself somewhat. We all do. It’s harder and harder to ignore those things. It’s a different world now”.

In spite of the different world – once more they emerge victorious. A distraction free injection shooting straight through the veins- searching for something lumpen to kick into life, Falling Down has us, especially when the second minute trips into the third in a spree of heat-seeking bass punctuations and streaks of rhythmic stab-stop-start menace, falling through versions of our suspended selves. Yow chained to the drain with caustic tongue, rotten stomach, cracked eyeball freak. Frustrated groans and grumbles. An itch on the arse but the straitjacket has been fastened far too tight to reach the darn spot, a string of drool cleaned from his chin by a musty, old rag. Somewhere else, Dunning Kruger rushes through the blood in a rampage of amplified riffs sick on prescription pills. Sims’ bass baiting the extractor fan guitars, spitting acrid shapes against the air, Yow hopscotching the traps as he proceeds down a passageway of darkness occasionally broken by a blink of a dim light. Meanwhile, the chug and jolt of Moto(R) is nauseous with biting harmonics and angular abrasion. Slipping and sliding everywhere yet colliding in just the right way that makes a meteorite strike feel like an anxious child’s sneeze.

The Jesus Lizard weren’t just a part of but a primary participant in underground punk culture where the zines and the tapes were the traded goods of the day. They saw it shift. The survival of which is summarised in Rack – the result of the original four members whose shared backgrounds, at least in the sense of growing up together alongside the Lizard’s rise, provided the lifeblood for the group. A lifeblood that has never really dissipated. If anything it still fuels them. A chemistry that can only be contained with all four of them in the room. An excitement shared by everybody.

”Yes absolutely. Right from the start – we thought it would be a mistake not to reference the past. To act like we don’t sound like that anymore. When you make a conscious decision to create something different, well at that point, for me, it becomes contrived” Denison says. ”We didn’t want to do that. We were perfectly happy to pick up where we left off.

What transpires is that some of the tunes had been around longer than people might think, opening up the imagination a few inches wider as to what the post-Blue album may have sounded like had they remained together. Or maybe dissolving at that time would have diluted the impact (or even existence) of Rack – a high point in their contemporary, recorder career. ”In fact, Lord Godiva and Falling Down, we had actually done demos of back in the late 90s. We just never finished it. So we literally started where we left off and then the bulk of the material has been put together over the last couple of years. You can’t ignore your past but you don’t wanna dwell on it either”.

Is That Your Hand? cracks and sparkles like the eyes of a laughing maniac reflected I’m wet headlights in a vermin outburst of chord contortions rearranging the equations of what lays before it with their contaminated barbs. Afterwards, similar to a twisted axis of siblings mimicking each other by pulling faces but a grubby, glass sheet of delayed time is slipped between them, Swan The Dog is a workout of bass punches writhing nude in the wild. Stealthily and with a slime trail of guitars not far behind it, it contemplates another fill to secure a feat of flawness and fierce totality, occasionally recognising a space wide and empty enough to insert themselves into like a hysterical squirt of epoxy. But at other times- these things breathe. The album’s vivacity and directness is conducive to the combination of just those four members – comrades, each a cog, or possible spanner, to give this old machine new life, a concerted effort to emphasise the individual angels of each member that perform a vital limb. Without either of them, a notable piece would be missing (no disrespect to the necessary Jim Kimball of amphetamine blues pack Laughing Hyaenas) but still – it wouldn’t be the same. ”It’s definitely the chemistry between the original four members. There was a brief period in the late ’90s where Mac McNeilly left and had a different drummer. It just wasn’t the same. We’ve all played with other people – I’ve probably done the most things away from the band over the past 25 years, and it just has a different vibe. With the Jesus Lizard I just felt unique. I felt like this is our thing. We own this. Nobody else sounds like this. We don’t sound like this when we play with other people. It’s only here. There’s definitely a thing”.

The album – an encapsulated projection of where the band was once, and where they are now. Stood with their backs to the wall, and pissing against it. The chemistry left to settle and erupt over 28 years evolves into a psychic bond, a relational respiratory period, an elongated episode of temporal percolation, a connection of imminent significance that eliminates ego in favour of keeping their past, and future selves free from the pillories of embarrassment. Only a handful of bands from the 90s can also be a 90s band of the here and now. The Lizard are a band that, evidentially, can perform that function, as well as perforate any expectations of them if they didn’t, perfectly fine. With an awareness of legacy in mind, for better or worse, the weight of what’s expected is something to consider, for better or worse.

”If you let it – it can intimidate you. It took a while to get everyone on board. This feeling like we’ve done all this other stuff. We did some great stuff – and sometimes it wasn’t. I always felt like we could keep going and improve things and just focus on moving ahead, evolving. I think eventually that’s what happened here. If you’ve got a body of work behind you, you can’t ignore it. It would be contrived to try to ignore that. Even insulting. This is what got you here. When we play live, people wanna hear those songs. At the same time – you’re not obligated to stay there. You have to keep moving forward. That’s what’s going on’’.

Sometimes we fall victim to our own imagination as a music-consuming person. Wanting the pieces to be there that aren’t actually there. Sometimes they’re there. Sometimes they’re not. We always wish things would be better. ”On the one hand you have to accept what it is on its own merits. An entity that exists in and of itself. If you’ve been a fan of someone, you’re always going to be looking those bangers, you’re always going to be looking for the one that lifts you up, that takes hold of your imagination, the kind of thing that you can be whether you’re driving around with your friend and everyone’s getting off or you’re sitting around at home having a drink, next thing you know you’re dancing by yourself. Those great songs set you free in a way nothing else does. Not books. Not movies. That’s what rock music does”.

Speaking of bangers, Hide & Seek came out of nowhere. A pellet-scatter of tracks in its chaotic, joyously poisonous wake, the bottle top was finally flicked off, representing to us a deliciously immersive collision of all we thought we knew (and didn’t know) about the Lizard as a remarkably bizarre group – brimming with ideas, boasting all manner of maddening dynamics, riff spillage and four-way interplay: rawboned, agile and electric one moment, nothing but tight spring and terse muscle the next, regurgitating whatever the last section has sucked into its jaws. ”We knew that was a banger from the start. Our producer, Paul Allen had a hand in that too. Making the intro longer. Give it time to set up. Right from the start he would say Don’t argue with me. This is the first single right here”.

The singles that followed, Alexis Feels Sick, Moto(R) and more recently, Falling Down are a perfect demonstration of their unbridled desire to tease, and torture, their critics, their audiences, themselves. The spectrum stretches deeper than most people may assume to be the case. Never the same – eternally lizard.

As pioneers of underground culture, too stubborn to not pitch their tent anywhere else other than the location of the odds pitted against them – too smart to stay there forever and let time glide by, the band refused to consider working with Ipecac records, a default failing by the sheer vision of their independence. ”You’re a little too close to things sometimes. As a band, it’s one less thing for us to fight over. One less thing we have to form coalitions and committees over. It happens in group thinking. Let’s hand it off to them. Unless we absolutely hate it. Let’s do it”.

Armed with both an interest and antipathy in anything and everything that funnels its way through their volatile racket, the instigators return as the world is alight with what they were the architects of – now suddenly here with a new album. The era without category. The stage without scenery. The era of reunions. The era of classic bands still being classic bands. The era of cult bands turning into classic bands – and see how THAT pisses people off. The era of classic bands turning into cult bands (repeat). The era of anything is possible with the old man in his deck chair clutching to his memory trophies bellowing into a cloud that tired of his complaining decades ago, unwilling to welcome the possibility that the best music is made tomorrow, will swipe to the sides along with his myopic mindset.

”I think now we’re in the period of literally, anything goes. I don’t know if it’s because of the population. The world is so big now. We used to be in the culture of minuscule, small cult things. Now – every style and subcultural thing has its own audience. It’s united through the internet, communicating with each other. I also think we’re in a recovery period where people are buying vinyl and CDs again. After the Jesus Lizard ran its course, in 98, and 99, you had that period people just stopped buying music. To me the 90s was the absolute peak of recorded music sales” Denison recalls. ”Then, it just stopped. Record stores went away. People just started streaming and downloading everything. Now – it’s recovering in a way. Old people with fancy stereos buying vinyl. Or younger people. I have a teenage daughter. She and her friends buy CDs. Why? Because they’re driving older cars that have CD players still in them. I think we’re in a resurgence period”.

This brings us back to why a new Jesus Lizard album feels entirely right for the moment. A band that never dates, despite the intense heat of the era they dawned from, and the unfortunate, misshapen gingerbread men belonging to an era can do to you. Yet that’s the difference between any old ‘noise rock’ unit and The Jesus Lizard, they belong to no-one except themselves. ”It happens to come with a side of a resurgence of this kind of music. I also think it’s the socio-economic and socio-political climate where things have been polarised, and extreme. The people over here view the people over there as existential threats. You can’t be non-committal anymore. You’re expected to show your colours and state whose side you’re on. Everything you do is questioned and scrutinised. All of that is happening and people are getting into this kind of music as a show of allegiance”.

28 years and one album later – no wonder people are clamouring to sign up. As on Lord Godiva, the seed of which extends back just shy of 30 years either reminded, or prophesised, the Jesus Lizard are here, as they always were ‘forcing cool into uncool’, and in turn, uncool into cool.

~

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Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins ©

Words by Ryan Walker