Jesus Lizard
Liar

THE REVIEW

Hot Sands of Texas

David Yow is perpetually afflicted by grime, the grime that plagues this guy is man and all his blemishes, even guitarist Denison must have had his fill of common sense and decency. Coming off the vomit-inducing masterpiece "Goat," they try again and come out with this other creative fire more intense and shattering compared to the cornerstone goat, and Denison proves to be what he is: one of the most innovative and ingenious six-string torturers from the most putrid underground.

Yow doesn’t know how to sing, know this, but it’s the only way to sing what he sings about: feces, industrial waste, the mediocrity of bodily fluids, how man cannot feel like God because of the lower belly. A martyrdom of stages, a corollary of PH metrics, that’s what this record is.
"Boilermaker", by 1993 hardcore had fallen under the fragmentations of post-rock, it’s split, and thus the singing emerges fragmented. Yow's singular nasal scream on "Gladiator" is supported by a low riff that hits with its reservoir of residues like a bat to the stomach, nervous fits from a mind truly on the brink of mental collapse, it’s spasmodic derailment, it’s a tremendous mixture. The Jesus Lizard are epic in a way that Steve Albini, by metalinguistic choice, never was; theirs is a hardcore that advances devastatingly and ends its run laid waste.
"Whirl" is a gastric carcinoma: a collage of turbine-noise.

Who are the Jesus Lizard? And how can a cascade of malodorous post-feces generate epic? You'll get a clear answer in "Slave Ship", one of the tracks I place among the top five sound apocalypses in rock history: turn up the volume to full blast, throw open the windows, grab an "air guitar," undress, and reveal your "charms" to yourself while Denison self-celebrates through a long, prodigious, granite viper that coils over itself and McNeilly's battering shots, with such music in the background, those who do not "KNOW" will liquefy with their own rustic folly in front of your being a monad, and for four titanic minutes and 15 seconds feel like a Goethean Faust above judgment, feel like Alex Trocchi as he injects the serum and resurrects the living, tell historical spirit and ontology to go screw themselves.

In the treacherous "Perk" Sims, Denison, Kimball, McNeilly are assassins in wheelchairs, besieged by the spirits of legends from that Midwest states' substratum, they pursue their purposes by setting to music the abominations of Humwawa whose face is a mass of guts traveling on a whispering southern wind, lord of fevers and pestilences. "Puss" is spastic drum-beat, yet more eviscerated gut, gruesome garage core, Big Black/Rapeman/Shellac acid disembowelment in the Jesus Lizard is endowed with a much more rock and sanguine propulsion compared to Albini's cold electronics.
"Zachariah" is a seance invocation entirely played on the instrumental spiritualism produced by His Majesty Denison's violent and controlled dissonances, and it is of a tragic and paranoid advance that touches the macabre ritual, worthy of southern voodoo ceremonies Gelal and Lilit, vivid visitations in the beds of the unfortunate in their repose.

In peace's confluences, the warrior spirit turns against itself, some by torturing their own selves, others by putting on the Jesus Lizard.