where the jesus lizard turns drunken rambling into music.
the jesus lizard is a noise rock band formed in 1987 from austin, texas, formed by vocalist david yow, guitarist duane denison, and bassist david wm. sims. the wm. stands for william. noise rock, as people know it today, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the jesus lizard. the jesus lizard crafted this abrasive, ear-scraping sound that wasn’t exactly punk, post-hardcore, or true art rock. they seemed to expand on the likes of sonic youth with their experimental dissonance, but they had a strict discipline and sense of dread in their music.
“Monkey Trick” is one of their most famous songs, from their most well-known 1991 album goat. goat was produced by steve albini, who fronted big black, and he made a few very interesting decisions on the song. one of them is making sims’ bass incredibly loud.
the bass is dominant, driving, and gritty. nasty, even, as it’s the main thing that drives the song forward as the other instruments punctuate the verses. when i thought it couldn’t get any nastier, denison’s shrill, dissonant guitar cuts in when you least expect them. the guitar has the quality of being both alienatingly sparse and heavily distorted enough to fill in the space between david yow’s chaotic shrieking. speaking of which, yow sounds like a rambling drunk. he alternates between vaguely poetic mumbling and panicked screaming, and his cryptic lyricism appears to orbit around some kind of horrible incident but never manages to form a coherent narrative. weirdly enough, yow’s chaotic presence almost accentuates the song’s tight and intentional structure, even when the execution is so strange.
if you’ve read any of my previous posts, which can be found here, then you can probably tell i love it when music brings together contradictory elements in new ways. “Monkey Trick” is a perfect example of this, as it somehow manages to combine atonality, something very close to a verse-chorus-verse structure, and a vocal delivery most musicians would flinch at into something coherent and just damn awesome to listen to. i haven’t heard anything like it.
