The Best Band in the Universe

By Matthew

n the early 90's, The Jesus Lizard was critically acclaimed, one of the darlings of the college music scene, and friends of Kurt Cobain. None of that helped me much when faced with their music for the first time at age 13. Kids my age were eagerly devouring whatever "Seattle Sound" MTV was peddling (through videos at least instead of reality television). I considered myself adventurous when I signed up for BMG's overpriced Music-in-the-mail "Grunge" program. Occasionally a picture or review would entice me to buy something I'd never heard of and after reading that "The Jesus Lizard" was Nirvana's current favorite, I ordered "Down".

Wow – No amount of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, or Nirvana could have prepared me for that album. Where was the familiar structure of quiet verse to dramatic chorus? Where was the melody? Where were the easily recognized 4 x 4 time signatures? Even the liner notes were difficult to relate to – there were no pictures of heroically posing band members or lyrics to read… just an illustration of an upside down dog falling to its doom.

This stuff was not in keeping with Grunge as I accepted it at the time and the music sat unplayed in a box for years. It wasn't until doing some unpacking after college that I found the disc again and gave it a spin. Oh what a difference some living makes… This time the music made sense. It's dense and noisy and asynchronous and tense, but that's what it wants to be. David Yow sings like some kind of drunk, wounded animal and doesn't care to ever actually hit a note, but few others would sound as fitting in accompanying the terse and borderline math-rock music. As I listened to more and more, their fun and dark sense of humor started to come through. Where else in rock do you get lines like, "I will pay your mother one half of one dollar and she'll come and sleep with my band," or "So since the surgery, how's that ghost limb? Hey man, say man, have you been rubbin' your nub?" and on and on and on. It's all wrapped up with a tough swagger that shames most rock acts.

I love the The Jesus Lizard because they were my entree back into a period of music that was special to me. As a suburban kid living before the internet, it was easy to get blindsided by what was popular on the radio and television and miss out on some truly great acts. There were some amazing things happening in rock during the late 80's. Rediscovering The Jesus Lizard lead me to many other bands lost in the shuffle of that era because they were a little more difficult to figure out than Nirvana… a little more complex in their songwriting. Sometimes that's a very exciting thing.