While mowing the lawn today, I realized the most important thing in considering The Jesus Lizard’s legacy is how completely they defined a sound - pretty much, thick bass, pounding drums, creeping guitar, and brig-hostage vocals are all what we think of as “noise rock” most of the time, and no band has better exemplified this than the Jesus Lizard. As a result, there are bands today that are usually well-received with the “Jesus Lizard Stipulation” - that is, “they sound like The Jesus Lizard, but they are good at sounding like The Jesus Lizard, so its #chill.”
I’ve been into several of these bands since my initial exposure to The Jesus Lizard the summer before I started college, and of the ones I can think of in The Jesus Lizard genre, the best are Clockcleaner, Pissed Jeans, and Daughters (on their most recent album). Its almost as if these bands each picked a personality of their homage and exemplified it as perfectly as possible. For Clockcleaner, that was the “Blockbuster” personality - the guy in a ten gallon hat at the roadhouse bar who sits uncomfortably close to the bathroom and kind of develops a lazy eye as he makes rape jokes. Pissed Jeans went the working man route - the guy who just got off his shift at the steel mill, drank half a case of Keith Stone, and stumbles loudly around town looking for trouble (“Monkey Trick”).
Daughters, however, have exemplified what might be my favorite Jesus Lizard on their self titled album from earlier this year - the rabid mouth breather running naked through the woods, completely snapped, a la the first three tracks of Liar. The unrepentant raw energy of the album is astounding, and all the songs are really expertly crafted to deliver prime visceral impact.
Opener “The Virgin” starts things breathlessly, with the sort of riff-and-pull structure that never settles, instead building into a full feedback and double-bass rage, before breaking into a tremolo’d guitar note and starting over again. “The Hit”, the strongest single track, builds off a riff that rolls like a Panzer through a barn and breaks down into a the sort of slide riff Duane Denison might imagine for a Jesus Lizard song after a few too many Boilermakers.
“Our Queens (One Is Many, Many Are One)” starts with a guitar part that could be from a Jesus Lizard album (duh) - before going off the rails into a grindesque rip up and landing in a mosh, catching its breath, and building to another peak with a guitar part that sounds like a record scratching itself behind its bleeding hackles. “The Unattractive, Portable Head” begins with a triangle hit, has fucking handclaps - that start right as there is a wail so unearthly you can’t tell if its singer Alexis Marshall or a twisted guitar string, and ends with a twisted-organ sing along. The album ends 28 minutes after it began, and leaves the listener without an ounce of gristle.
However, there is a problem with the album - it is bastard or orphan, depending on how you think about it. As a result of the recording of the album, the band broke up (later being reformed by Marshall and drummer John Syverson to release this album) because of the arguments resulting from the drastic shift in sound from Daughters’ previous work to this album.
Daughters’ first and second full lengths, Canada Songs and Hell Songs, are far less accessible than Daughters. Canada Songs is a pretty straight-up arty grindcore album and Hell Songs shows more of the The Jesus Lizard strain but still being way more terse and mathy than Daughters. Singer Alexis Marshall called said of Daughters (I jacked this quote from Wikipedia):
"It's so easy to steer it and try to be accepted, and do this because this is what's good, and this is what's going to make our band popular. That's no good. That's not art. That's shit. It's not even shit. It's less than shit. What's less than shit? I don't even know. Trying to be other bands... that's less than shit."
Harsh words from an artist about a work he had a part in. What I find most conflicting is this: why would he allow Daughters to be released after reforming the band if he didn’t like the sound? And furthermore, I might be off here, but Daughters is not exactly going to get DC 101 airplay. The noise and grind scenes are pretty self-contained, but I imagine there is some cross-interest (I mean, I like Burmese just as much as I like Magrudergrind), and while there is less breathless screaming and more David Yow dog-gnashing, and the songs are generally longer and have a higher level of production polish, this doesn’t translate to “popularity” in my mind when. They are still making loud music that begs the casual listener to turn it off or kill themselves.
This brings me back to my original Jesus Lizard comparison. I don’t know what “other bands” Marshall felt guitarist Nicholas Andrew Sadler was trying to be like with Daughters, but I imagine The Jesus Lizard would be an apt guess. And for that, I think this album shines - it takes a Jesus Lizard personality, owns it, expands it with its own past experience (the grindier, artier tendencies) and creates something new in the process, a different sound for a band that may be more accessible - you know, like stronger song structure and repeated parts - but is by no means a selling out. I wish they could have continued in this vein - as long as bands try to sound like The Jesus Lizard, I’ll be listening.
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