The unlikely return of Jesus Lizard

David Yow was convinced Jesus Lizard had played its last show when he exited the stage at the Umeå Open festival in Umeå, Sweden, in March 1999.

“The last song we played was ‘Monkey Trick,’ and I said, ‘This is our last song.’ And I felt so weird, and it was really emotional, because I meant this is our last song and we’re not ever going to do this again,” Yow said by phone in late November. “When we broke up in ’99, I was ready to stop. The last record we did didn’t have [drummer] Mac [McNeilly] on it and fuck that shit. If it doesn’t have Mac, it’s not the Jesus Lizard.”

In 2008, though, the band reformed for a series of what Yow referred to as “reenactment shows,” with McNeilly returning to the fold for appearances at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago (I was in attendance for that one, and Yow and Co. were as ever a complete force of nature) and All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals in New York and England. Nearly a decade later, the band reconvened in December 2017 for another round of reunion concerts. In the wake of those shows, and initially unbeknownst to Yow, band members David Wm. Sims and Duane Denison began to toy with writing some new material, which they eventually brought to the frontman.

“Duane played a few of the ideas for me, and I thought, you know what? These are really good,” said Yow, who will join his bandmates in headlining Newport Music Hall on Friday, Dec. 6, joined by local opener Cellar Dwellar. “And I remember someone saying, ‘Well, what are we going to do now? Should we do an album?’ And we were all like, okay, let’s do an album. … And now it just seems like we’ll never go away.”

Entering into writing absent a label deal, the band embraced the freedom that came with working outside of the system. “We just sort of did it the way we wanted,” Yow said. “We didn’t have to ask anybody anything or try to impress anybody.”

At the same time, recording remotely for the first time presented challenges that didn’t exist back when the musicians all lived in Chicago and could convene for sessions with engineer Steve Albini, whose death earlier this year so rocked Yow that he still struggles at times to process the loss. “I’ve been doing so much press these last few months, and sometimes I can talk about Steve, and sometimes I can’t,” said Yow, who recalled one session where Albini had him lay on the floor with one microphone held to his chest while a second mic suspended from the ceiling swung in a slow circle above his head. “And we did that on a song called ‘Seasick,’ and you can hear that as I’m making this one noise, it sort of undulates and oscillates unnaturally, and that’s the phase shifting between those two microphones.”

With band members now spread from New York to Los Angeles, the process this time around could be arduous and unnatural, Yow said, the band slowly amassing tracks by trading MP3 files back and forth online. And yet, the resulting album, Rack, released on Ipecac in September, kicks off in ferocious fashion with “Hide & Seek,” a gnarled, barroom brawler of a tune that wouldn’t feel out of place on those mid-90s albums. And throughout, the grizzled rock band maintains a vibe that falls somewhere between menacing (“Grind”) and deeply discomforting (“What If?”), the songs routinely fueled by a barrage of terse, jagged riffs, pummeling drums and Yow’s ever-chaotic presence. As a singer, Yow remains a singular entity, though he said his vocals this time around drew upon a range of influences, from the tracks Mark Lanegan recorded with Queens of the Stone Age to Mexican American singer Lhasa de Sela, whose album The Living Road, from 2003, played in steady rotation as Yow worked.

“She has one song, ‘Con toda palabra,’ and I kind of stole the phrasing from that for one of our songs,” Yow said, briefly breaking into de Sela’s song and then the band’s “Falling Down” to demonstrate the similarities existent between the two. “So, I’m a thief, yeah.”

Other influences that bled into the writing process were less welcome, including the current political and social climates, which inspired lines such as “I forecast them stupid” on the song “Is That Your Hand?” “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but the United States is a county full of morons,” Yow said. “I don’t keep up with things as much as I should, but I’m completely aware of how idiotic this country is, and at this point it’s hard to not say something about it.”

This sense of dread is balanced by a deadpan humor that surfaces both in the band’s music and in the course of my conversation with Yow. Asked how he would have described himself in the early days of the Jesus Lizard’s existence, for example, he replied, “Short and ugly,” and then expounded. “It was just so much fun then, and we were pretty motivated to get to a point where we could pay rent through being in a band and not need to have a stupid job.”

Asked how these motivations might have shifted all these years later, Yow, paused. “Golly, that’s a really good question. Why the fuck are we doing this? I guess because our booking agent booked us shows and we’re supposed to go to Baltimore and Louisville and wherever else to play a bunch of dumb songs for some idiots,” he said, and laughed. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I guess it’s really very much the same. The biggest difference is it’s much more physically draining now that I’m actually old.”