Call me nutty but in early January I went to see The Jesus Lizard three nights in a row. This means 2025 has peaked bloody early and that ain’t gonna be changed by Black Sabbath directed by the guitarist from Audioslave.
Good luck, other bands! You lesser fools. You might as well put your equipment into storage, return to the drawing board and have a long hard think about how you might even consider topping The Jesus Lizard.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Most memorably, David Yow at Glasgow’s Queen Margaret Union, dressed in a large Billie Eilish t-shirt with a little bit of his testicle sack poking out the side of a zebra print G-string. As I said, call me nutty.
Traditionally, I was never one for spending precious time and money on seeing the same band at multiple gigs. Most bands’ performances don’t vary from one night to the next and if you try to pull such successive attendance shenanigans with The Pretenders, then Chrissie will throw a hissy.
The Jesus Lizard are not most bands. Nor are they, last time I checked, The Pretenders. What’s Yow going to wear tonight and will he take it all off (or not)? Is he going to hurl himself into or on top of the audience right at the beginning of the set or wait until he’s sunk several beers instead? Will he injure himself permanently this time? Will he stagedive into the densest section of the crowd and surf all the way back to the sound desk, microphone in hand, barely missing a lyric? (Manchester.) Or will he flop onto a small guy with glasses who’s utterly unprepared to catch him? (Leeds. “That was kinda funny.”) Which profanities will he use to insult his own fans on this particular evening? Will any song from 1998’s BLUE make it into their changing setlists? (No.) Anything could happen! Well, not anything. They won’t play ‘Slave Ship’, sadly, but that’s beside the point. The important thing is that it feels like anything could happen which is how all the most exciting live bands operate. Hands up if you remember The Fall.
Committing to this string of dates wasn’t a difficult decision to make. For a start, nothing else happens in January. (Not even Death In Paradise is scheduled until February these days.) Plus, The Jesus Lizard were already the finest live band I ever saw. Put that on record, should anybody care. All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2009. Yow removes his top as the first song starts. A hand slowly raises from the middle of the crowd. It beckons him. Yow clocks it. He nods. Then he hurls himself in the direction of the gesturer. I’m pleased to report that Yow, who is now at the age of 64, still has less regard for his own personal safety and dignity than he does for buttoning up his trousers.
Yow is the focus point. Credit is due to the actual musicians. Duane Denison’s no-nonsense and deceptively intelligent riffwork. (He’s classically trained, don’t you know.) The mostly stationary bassist David Wm. Sims, authoritatively laying down the near-funk groove. Mac McNeilly, who doesn’t seem to have an ounce of fat on him, which is doubtless because drumming that forcefully and busily is very hard work indeed.
Good luck, other bands at your poxy little drawing boards! Try any of the hijinks mentioned above and you’d probably look desperately ridiculous.
In the sticky floored venues and surviving record shops of the northern music scene, The Illness are known as “York La Tengo”. I haven’t actually heard them described as that, admittedly, but… Why not? Perhaps it’s because there’s a Liverpool contingent to the revolving collective and more than three individuals are involved. Still, it’s a comparison that helps give an inkling of The Illness’s indie-rockin’ range, their skill at balancing melody with scrappiness or repetition and their ability to pack an album with different styles, shifts and singers while still achieving a solid sense of seamlessness. They’ve got some hip connections, too. A 2020 EP had transatlantic contributions from Bob and Steve who play in Pavement. This one’s got David Pajo on it, providing lead vocals to ‘Speedway Star’ and playing guitar on another piece. That’s the headline for all the cool-blog-web-zines out there but the quality remains high throughout as the record rattles across scratchy lo-fi, baritone synth pop, freak folk with dilated pupils, ambient intermissions, polyphonic orchestration, casual shamble rock, more than a few moments that recall the anything-goes eclecticism of Super Furry Animals and a cathartically uplifting penultimate moment of dark-ish alt-rock. Commendable team effort.
Denude are three guys from the Chicago and Milwaukee underground scenes and this is their debut LP. With its math-rocking musical shapes, which all critics will be contractually obliged to describe as “angular”, and the nearly spoken singing style, it’ll appeal instantly to fans of Slint, Lungfish, Enablers, The Unit Ama and other brilliantly creative organic rock bands of that nature. ‘Animal Tracks’ feels a bit like a Shellac song that Bob Weston would sing, whereas you can imagine the lead on ‘12th Battle On The Isonzo’ being taken by Steve Albini. May he rest in withering scorn. You can tell it’s been recorded quickly by musicians who have practised themselves into a sweaty and aching mess. The guitar parts slot together like a complex jigsaw and the drums seem to be tumbling down in pursuit of these, like Keith Moon would do, rather than leading the way.
Expose’s music has been described as like “hardcore falling down a mountain”. Maybe that’s how they used to sound but it’s not so much the case on this second LP. ‘Speed Dial’ might have a punk rock running time of just over a minute. Style-wise, it’s more comparable to Oneida in a rush to get back to the van. Next track, ‘The Constant’, is positively psychedelic with its pretty lead lick and whirlpool pedal effects. Elsewhere, some of the material is synth squelch meets free jazz. Other parts offer trippy takes on Spiderland-ish post rock. ‘Description’ has an OSEES garage rattle to it. ‘Self Terror’ is the kind of racket Pavement would make, in the very early days, when they were still trying to be Sonic Youth. It’s not hardcore, summit descending or otherwise. It is, however, packed with loads of noisy ideas.
Bikini Beach could be the title of a softcore VHS from the 1980s. In this case, it’s a trio from Lake Constance, bordering Germany, Austria and Switzerland. To say they enjoy fuzzy riffs is an understatement. It wouldn’t be surprising if they’d Googled Fu Manchu’s equipment rundown on one of those websites that supply such specific details and then immediately ordered everything listed. That should give an impression of the density of their distortion. In terms of tempo and chutzpah, they’re livelier than the ‘Chu, approaching hyperactive punkiness in places. There are also occasional moments that make use of thinner surf licks. They’re never far away from another phat passage, however. The album title refers to the fact that Bikini Beach are “gloomier than ever” and their lyrics deal with negativities both personal and global. You wouldn’t necessarily notice, though, given the sound itself is so fun, warm and energetic.
Toru are the instrumental power trio who could soundtrack the apocalypse. Maybe they are doing that, the way things are going. They crunch away vigorously, jerking the listener one way then the other. There’s a hard-prog undercurrent and a propensity for confrontational noise which suggests the influence of Japanese racket-makers like Ruins. You know how Merzbow liked the feedback parts of Jimi Hendrix songs but didn’t think they lasted long enough so he decided to make his own music that was only like those sections? Well, you can imagine Toru having a similar attitude towards the hidden tracks on Nirvana albums. That’s where the real gold was buried. The third song, ‘Volutes’, brings the maelstrom down a smidgen. It’s like a jazzier Godspeed You! Black Emperor or something. Then it’s back to the business of thrashing around as if they’re all falling down some stairs together. You’ll notice the title of every song begins with a “V”. Perhaps they’re sticking two fingers up at anyone who likes cosy “nice” music.
Splitterzelle’s members are Pedro Pestana from Portugal’s 10000 Russos and Sidney Jaffe from Germany’s Arcane Allies. Their record kicks off with cosmic krautrock performed at breakneck pace and heavy on the synths. ‘Disciple’ is darker, throbbier and more industrial. It could be used to score a seedy sex club scene in a low-budget cyberpunk movie whose characters have bionic arms and names like Darreal Tektonik. ‘Periphery’ fuses space rock with drone to immersive effect. The vocals on ‘Resilience’ are sliced to pieces and manipulated into abstract, disembodied wailing. ‘Shield’ could be Cut Hands featuring Robert Fripp. Much of the album is so electronic-beat-oriented it would work as effectively on the dancefloor as at a Hawkwind-style “happening” in a field. Best not rave or workout to that high BPM-ed first song, mind, or you’ll do yourself an injury.
“We love Indiana Jones, so we wrote a track about Indy himself, fighting the bad guys and always coming out on top,” say this Rome-based trio. “It fills us with hope for the world we live in, which could really use some.” Fair enough. Take inspiration where you can find it. That’ll be the opening song, then: ‘Temple Of Doom’. Its music sounds a bit like Mudhoney if they’d been as smitten with Sabbath as many of their Seattle contemporaries, rather than basically copying The Stooges most of the time. The following number is about the omnipresence of smartphones: “Our partners in fun and sadness”. Then there’s one about an apparently made-up foodstuff (‘Salty Biscuits’). Later, they return to their DVD collection and sing about the 1985 Schwarzenegger vehicle Commando. The singer and guitarist, who goes by “Poochie”, has a distinctive voice. It’s quite unhinged and he’s proud of it. As for their Tiggerish style, “It’s not stoner, it’s not garage, it’s not punk, it’s not psych,” FVZZ POPVLI insist. It is all those things, to be honest, and a little more. Which must be what the album title is hinting at.
JR Moores’ latest book, Off The Ground: Paul McCartney In The 1990s, is available now and yes he did manage to squeeze in the odd noise-rock reference somehow
