Review: The Jesus Lizard – Rack
When Blue, the last full-length from The Jesus Lizard, released in 1998 to little fanfare, it seemed an appropriately ugly final note for a band so deliberately unpleasant. The end of a lukewarm major label run that even today inspires little retrospection among fans, its weird, ghoulish sound felt, if nothing else, like an appropriate “fuck you” to end on.
But 2024 comes, a year that’s been notable for canonized noise rock with both a new release from contemporaries Shellac as well as the death of genre-figurehead Steve Albini. It felt like the end of a very specific era in rock music, one that’d been re-animated and paraded around for decades, finally laid to rest. It was, then, a suitably inappropriate time for The Jesus Lizard to return. With arguably the greatest rhythm section in rock history still intact, and David Yow’s vocals being, by all accounts, as good as ever, they seemed primed for a monumental return with Rack.
But despite Rack’s devotion to the band’s iconic sound, it has a distinctly brighter, flatter production that is both immediately noticeable and slightly distracting. Handled by engineer Paul Allen, the production is certainly attempting to evoke the spirit of Albini’s technique but ultimately feels static and flat; it’s a sound that doesn’t distinguish itself much from a lot of modern rock, leaving a monumental weight on the shoulders of the songwriting, which is ultimately a mixed bag.
Thankfully though, things start well. The lead single and opening track “Hide And Seek” has a great sense of movement to it, re-establishing the band with aplomb. David Yow’s performance emphasizes how well his vocals have held up after a quarter century away. His trademark, barbaric croon-bark combos have retained all the jutting, metal-edge viciousness they had during the band’s peak. Unfortunately, “Armistice Day” is really fucking tedious, a track that likely worked better in composition than in execution. Its glacial pace translates poorly to a modern, brighter production that doesn’t highlight the power of its guitars as well.
“Grind,” in stark comparison to “Armistice Day”‘s aimlessness, explodes to life with a fantastic, simple riff accented with a thick, addictive low-end, before establishing these chiastic guitar arpeggios. While it’s not as hard-edged as their finest material, “Grind instead” taps into just how infectious the best tracks from The Jesus Lizard are, showing a more pronounced debt to dance music through its rhythm section.
“What If?” is less impressive, continuing the inconsistent trajectory of Rack. Its structure—tense instrumentation wandering around a monotone monologue recital—is emblematic of a lot of dreadful ’90s rock trends, even if The Jesus Lizard themselves were progenitors to a lot of it; it was a time when the juxtaposition of American, clean-suburbia imagery shown alongside its hidden darkness and perversion was at least still a bit novel. A thousand bands have tried to do Black Flag‘s Family Man in the past 40 years, and it’s very easy to fuck it up. “What If?” isn’t exactly operating within that same thematic area but it feels just as laboured.
“Lord Godiva”‘s driving, mid-tempo instrumentation mostly serves as a foundation for one of Yow’s best vocal performances on the record. It’s perhaps a bit underwritten as a whole but you just get so easily swept up by its tenacity that it’s easy to forgive, highlighted by these oppressively textured bass ostinatos at the mid-point. “Alexis Feels Sick” has a similar direction but marks itself out in the tracklisting with these moments of muscular, chugging guitar that underline Yow’s more mournful, emotive wails.
“Falling Down” has a conventional rock bent to it while occasionally teasing a more sinister edge; it’s the most explicitly hook-driven song on the album, which fits the relative polish of Rack‘s sound. “Dunning Kruger” is conversely maybe the weakest moment on the record—a stock-rock structure without flair, even the usual eccentricities of The Jesus Lizard fall flat, feeling forced and confined by its shallow writing. Genuinely one of the weakest moments in their catalog and a massive warning light for a record that is running out of steam.
The legato riffing of “Moto(R)” feels beyond stale by this point in Rack, feeling less like a cohesive element of a greater whole and more like stretching limited ideas across a bloated tracklist; even with the runtime barely breaking 35 minutes, the pacing of the album makes it feel glacial at times. “Is That Your Hand?” feels similarly faceless, lacking identity and feeling static even when it tries to overwhelm.
“Swan The Dog” is a welcome change of pace as a closer, a song that’s more comfortable introducing disparate patterns and a higher key, resulting in a track that feels more alive and dynamic; after the moroseness of the album’s second half, it’s such a fucking breath of fresh air. Oozing with this knowing, cynical venom, it manages to tap into a lot of what embodied the best records from The Jesus Lizard, while also feeling fresh.
There’s been a thousand comeback albums in the past decade, and certainly those far worse than Rack. It’s perhaps appropriate in some ways for a band like The Jesus Lizard to come back in such an oddly muted way—to come back with relative cleanness, polish and restraint. It can seem bizarrely inoffensive at times, but even still, I bet these songs would take your head off live.
2.5/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
Rack is out now on Ipecac Recordings.
