In the totally unfinished basement (dirt floors, ancient brick walls) of the house I grew up in, there was, in addition to a musty side room filled with forgotten potatoes in a weird hanging trough, and the main room where my brother and I liked to get drunk and shoot a .22 cat rifle at the water heater, a mysterious crawl space—or more accurately a gaping hole in the wall—in one corner that led to God knows where. Despite our curiosity my siblings and I steered well away from it, because, well, it was fucking creepy. For a long time I thought of this as the perfect example of collective sibling pussification, but now I know we had ample reason to never explore its confines. It was where David Yow lived.
Yow, of Scratch Acid/Jesus Lizard fame, sounds like the kind of unhinged person who would live in a crawl space beneath an unsuspecting family’s house. Which is why I love him so. He is—along with Shannon Selberg, Al Johnson, and Matt Korvette—the most demented vocalist on the block. Yow moans, screams, hisses, snarls, warbles, slurs his words, coughs, chokes, hums, utters guttural gibberish, growls, yowls, howls, and generally disembowels his lyrics, frequently all in the same song. He is a noise rock genius, and once you’ve heard him “sing” you’ll never forget it.
Yow and bassist David Wm. Sims formed The Jesus Lizard in 1987 out of the ashes of Scratch Acid, the seminal noise rock band Kurt Cobain loved so much. Yow wasn’t originally supposed to be the singer, but serendipity struck and put him behind the microphone where, in the words of Michael Azerrad, author of Our Band Could Be Your Life, he sounded “like a kidnap victim trying to howl through the duct tape over his mouth.” I find Azerrad’s description limiting—Yow does just as good an imitation of a psychopathic killer as the victim of one—but it will do. Live, Yow was every bit as demented as his vocal chords; a lunatic on stage, he was known for licking audience members’ faces, in addition to a grab bag of similarly confrontational antics.
During its tenure, The Jesus Lizard—who in addition to Yow and Sims included Duane Denison on guitars and Mac McNeilly on drums—released six LPs and three EPs, and they’re all guaranteed to strip mine your mind. But who needs a frontal lobe when you’ve got noise rock? All that’s required is that you gape, slack-jawed, at the onslaught on your defenseless ear holes, and maybe get your face licked in the process.
1990’s Head was the band’s first full-length, and was produced by that high priest of noise, Steve Albini, for Touch and Go Records. Opener “One Evening” combines an up-front bass line with some seriously distorted vocals by Yow. Meanwhile Denison serves up some hot guitar riffs, he and Sims fall into a wonderful groove, and Yow mutters like a nutter, his vocals too buried for my liking. Fortunately such is not the case in the heart-stopping “S.D.B.J.,” which comes at you like a slow motion car accident with Yow, muttering and barking and even hacking up a lung, behind the wheel. Meanwhile, “My Own Urine” starts quietly, and then Yow comes in speaking, or sort of speaking, before he begins to put big spaces between every word while the band does its best job of imitating a malfunctioning piece of heavy industrial machinery. Yow finally lets out a long howl, very much like Shannon Selberg, and commences shouting like a man who has just stepped on a nail in a pair of flip flops (serves him right; flip flops are for assholes).
“If You Had Lips” opens with a simple guitar riff, followed by Yow—muttering unintelligibly about something—and the kick-ass rhythm section. Then Yowl does some heavy breathing as the band seesaws back and forth, before singing, “Hey shitmouth/I love you,” and following that with “When you smile/I can smell your breath/I see the shit/On your teeth.” An instrumental foray follows, and then Yow, distinctly for once, says, “Hey shitmouth/I love you/Will you bury me?” Meanwhile, “7 vs. 8” opens with some mighty drum pummel, and Yowl almost sings like a human being for a spell, before letting loose with a couple of screams. Denison’s guitar work is abusive, the drumming ditto, and it’s great and gets even better when Denison plays a rising and melodic note, which he sustains, guitar ringing, until the song’s end. “Pastoral” actually is a pastoral, at least for these guys. The guitar sounds civilized, and Yow comes in, sounding weary and resigned and down at the mouth, and the noise level remains below 747 levels as the band repeats the same riff over and over, although McNeilly occasionally throws in some crashing cymbals.
The detonating “Waxeater” comes at you like a maddened water buffalo, with the band playing at a manic tempo while Yow spits out a whole mess of unintelligible words and Denison blasts you with some brutal power chords. And I don’t even have words for what the rhythm section is doing. One thing I do know—I prefer Yow when he’s at his most unpredictably feral, and on “Waxeater” he’s too busy barking out the lyrics to throw in any deranged vocal wham bam jam a lam. Fortunately “Waxeater” is followed by the bludgeoning “Good Thing,” on which Yow speaks in tongues, mutters, comes on like a puzzled spazz, and finally does a poor imitation (on purpose, I’m certain) of laughing as the song comes to its conclusion. “Tight N’ Shiny” is an instrumental highlighting Denison’s guitar and McNeilly’s drums. It opens slowly before shifting tempo, then shifting tempo a second time before coming to a close. It’s a decent tune, but it proves conclusively that while The Jesus Lizard possessed formidable instrumental chops, Yow was 100 percent necessary to the venture.
“Killer McHann” proceeds at a breakneck speed, with Denison playing a choppy guitar while Yow cries out the lyrics like a madman. His voice rises, Denison shows off his chops, and then the rhythm section takes a hard left and Denison really rips into it while Yow goes, “Aaaaahaaah.” Finally, closer “Chrome” opens with a maelstrom of distorted guitar and mean bass before segueing into a throbbing and fast-paced killer of a tune. Yow’s vocals are buried in the mix, which is too bad because he’s in top form, talking to himself while Denison launches into a great guitar solo, something he should have done more often. Meanwhile Yow serves up what sounds like gibberish, but urgent gibberish, before the song ends.
The Jesus Lizard was one of the best noise rock bands of all time, due largely to the vocal stylings of David Yow. I love Shannon Selberg of Cows, but his brand of perversity was as much visual as vocal; Yow was the more intriguing singer, if only because the repertoire of noises he was capable of producing with his vocal chords was far greater. Only Al Johnson of U.S. Maple could compete with Yow at the level of sheer weirdness, and I’d have to call the competition between the two a draw.
I listen to them both with a sense of awe, because what they were doing was pressing against the limits of the listenable. To say you “like” them is to identify yourself as an outsider, and I’m proud to say I like them just as I like most extremists, the irony being that as extremists they didn’t much care whether I—or you—liked them or not. Sublime examples of art for art’s sake, they did just as they pleased, and if you didn’t like it, well, there was always England Dan and John Ford Coley.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
