The Jesus Lizard singer David Yow is not naked – which is probably for the best. It’s a cold night. But the frontman’s lack of nudity is pretty much the only key element missing from tonight’s ear-ringing encounter with the reunited US band, touring their late-career album Rack (2024). Clad in a black shirt and jeans, Yow prowls the stage, spitting, hollering inchoate insights into the microphone, clamping the cord between his teeth, darkly exhorting the crowd not to stop clapping. He mocks security handing out “little shot glasses of water” – Yow says it in a baby voice – “because someone might be thirsty”.
Every few songs, Yow launches himself into the audience, crowd-surfing all the way to the mixing desk. Less of a singer than a sui generis declaimer, he smears misanthropic lyrics across the grain of Duane Denison’s axle-grinder guitar and David Wm Sims’s malevolent bass. At the back, drummer Mac McNeilly keeps up a nimble, pile-driving rhythm that somehow manages to swing as well.
Yow, now 64, remains one of US underground music’s most storied performers, a grunge-era force of nature – and alcohol – who, in his band’s deranged 90s heyday, spent a fair amount of their gigs stripped to the waist or the ankles, annihilating the fourth wall. (According to legend, he would sometimes expose his testicles during one of Jesus Lizard’s instrumentals, Tight n Shiny.)
His disturbed showmanship was – and remains – in delicious contrast to the terse bursts of sound emanating from the rest of the band. The Jesus Lizard remain a cult act, cropping up only rarely as a reference. In Jordan Peele’s excellent 2022 sci-fi thriller Nope, one of the main characters sports a band T-shirt. They haven’t really had a TikTok moment, although the excellent Seasick, from their 1991 second album, Goat, might be a good candidate, with its meme-able refrain of: “I can’t swim.”
Nirvana were big fans. The two outfits shared a producer in the late Steve Albini, who once relayed to Yow that Kurt Cobain would try to get him to push what he referred to as “the Yow button” in the studio. In 1993, the two bands released a split single together, Puss/Oh, the Guilt. Tonight, Yow dedicates Mouth Breather to Albini, who not only engineered it, but provided the source material: a character assassination of a member of the band Slint who had house-sat, badly, for Albini.
What the Jesus Lizard lacked in variety, they more than made up for in their single-minded dedication to visceral torque and Yow’s savantish bile. Their appeal never quite translated to bigger audiences, despite the band’s black humour and a major label deal in 1995. The Jesus Lizard, phase one, fizzled out after their drummer McNeilly left. Yow grew tired of dutifully clocking in for chaos. They got on with their lives. LA-based Yow is a sometime actor, visual artist and photograph retoucher; the distinguished and professorial-looking Denison leaned towards jazz in the Denison/Kimball Trio and now plays in Tomahawk with Faith No More’s Mike Patton, who also runs the independent label Ipecac Recordings.
It’s a measure of Yow’s wit in interviews that he refers to the reunion gigs the Jesus Lizard played across 2008-9 as “re-enactments”. (His gigs with his other band, Qui, around the same time, resulted in a collapsed lung.)
Last September, though, saw the release of the first Jesus Lizard album in 26 years via Ipecac. Rack – which cleaves to the band’s tradition of four-letter, single-word titles – is a gem among reunion records. Enthusiastically featuring the classic lineup, it slots seamlessly into their discography, satisfyingly acerbic (Yow) and sculptural (Denison and Sims). The concise arpeggios anchoring the bulk of late-career tune Alexis Feels Sick are as fist-punching as anything in the Jesus Lizard’s early discography.
One update stands out: Armistice Day marks a death with writerly grace, bluesy compassion – and creeping dread. “Now the pain is returning,” Yow croons. In recent interviews, he has cited the late singer Lhasa de Sela as an unlikely inspiration. For What If?, another menacing new slowie, he sits on a seat, later handed to the crowd and passed over their heads. (“A loose stool,” growls Yow.)
Mostly, though, the past reveals itself to be both glorious and another country. Post-Covid, you can’t help but flinch at all the phlegm Yow sprays around. The lyrics to Puss are really quite unpleasant.
But Gladiator remains one of the Jesus Lizard’s most pummelling, heroic calling cards, a track that builds from simple bass, drums and Yow, and climbs in intensity. Gladiator II’s soundtrack compilers really missed a trick by not using it. Denison unleashes a metronomic riff that shifts around with microtonal variations, before McNeilly finds a new gear, and then another.
The reminders of the good old, bad old days keep coming: Then Comes Dudley, with its elegantly needling guitar and – on one of two encores – the minimal noir of Monkey Trick. Still a defiantly niche concern, the Jesus Lizard do precisely nothing tonight to invite in anyone not already inside the tent. But their myth remains undiminished. And, by the end, Yow is blowing us all kisses.
