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Rating: We are in New York in the mid-seventies. Metropolitan anxiety and distress emerge and heavily influence the new generation. Directly from the cultural backdrop of the Velvet Underground, proto-punk has already taken shape, filtered through existential nihilism that distinguishes it.
A new awareness has been born, and the way of making music in new bands has changed. The manifestations are heterogeneous, musically speaking, both in form and intent. On the one hand, however, there is a tendency towards the extremism of sounds, namely denial, the deconstruction of the musical fabric. It is the NO WAVE, where -Nothing is true- and -everything is permitted- become the -absolute creed. Among the protagonists of this awakening in search of a -new musical grammar and syntax-, comparable in literature to the -interior monologue- of Joyce's Ulysses, are these PRE-TEENAGE JESUS & THE JERKS.
In 1976 James Chance and Lydia Lunch lived together in the same apartment in NY. James
already had an academic musical background and jazz experience; Lydia was a very young
16-year-old lolita with a desire to write lyrics and poetry in a different way. Together with Japanese bassist
Reck (future FRICTION) and drummer Bradly Field, they trace these first three incomparable mad shards.
"THE CLOSET", morbid and sick; "LESS OF ME", delirious and neurotic; "MY EYES", hysterical and maladjusted. We are in the -introibo ad altare dei- opening this parody of a mass, with the invocation of -adolescent Jesus- and James Chance's saxophone that echoes deliriously on the ghost of Albert Ayler; Lydia Lunch’s guitar is primitive and distorted in noise and blood; the voice is broken and abused...
Humanity has definitely (de)cayed. It’s wild screeching or obsessive cadence, the personification of the morbid fantasies of an adolescent in the grip of sexual impulses, rather than neurasthenic and unstable noise. James Chance already works with Jody Harris, then with him in the Contortions: he is more oriented towards developing punk-funk themes through the vampirization of James Brown's corpse... Lydia then throws him out, already subjugated by extreme and torn minimalism, played in the guitar/voice binomial.
She will continue as the undisputed leader with the reworked band lineup, until the NO NEW YORK experience and the release of the 3 singles produced by Robert Quine (Voidoids). I love this 12" vinyl EP with the 1977 recordings (published by Ze Records in 1979), because James Chance plays the role of -guardian of the threshold-: he directs and magnificently controls Lydia Lunch's wild depravity. The reference document, for those wishing to fully experience the band's -complete- listening, is the CD most easily available from Atavistic, published in 1995 and comprising the entire production.
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