For the Jesus Lizard's first album in 26 years, guitarist Duane Denison had a vision.
"I was never worried about it," he says, from his home in Nashville, during a conversation about Rack, which finds the Jesus Lizard sounding mightier than ever. "I suppose some people might be in that position of, 'Oh man, what if we do something and it's no good? Or what if it doesn't measure up?' Well, to me, wouldn't you be able to tell when you're working on those songs? When you're making demos, shouldn't you know?"
He asserts, "I mean, one of the things I said right from the start was, we have to be brutal with quality control. If people get their feelings hurt, you have to remember, it's not personal. We have to approach every song as if this is someone else's record. So, it sounds exactly how we think it should sound."
Denison, singer David Yow and bassist David Wm. Sims initially formed the Jesus Lizard in Chicago, IL, in 1987 and used a drum machine for their first EP, Pure, before asking explosive drummer Mac McNeilly to join them in 1989. The quartet went on to all but define artfully aggressive underground rock music with a flurry of impeccable albums on Touch and Go, all of which were recorded by Steve Albini.
The band stopped working with Touch and Go and parted company with Albini, and Capitol Records released Shot in 1996, but McNeilly left the band for personal reasons later that year. After completing one more album, 1998's Blue, and their other contractual obligations, the Jesus Lizard broke up in 1998, but all four original members reconvened to resume touring activity in 2009. After a few legs, fans wondered if a new album might be in the cards.
"I had been lobbying for it all along — from 2009 on," Denison says. "And it was just a matter of getting everyone on board. Eventually, we just started doing songs, exchanging files, you know. And we figured, 'Well, whoever's dragging their feet, the train's leaving the station. You can get on now or forever hold your peace.' And that strategy seems to have worked."
In the press materials for the new album, the narrative states: "Unbeknownst to Yow, the band were always writing riffs, songs and arrangements in the hopes that their frontman would commit to making new music. Yow finally acquiesced after hearing (and enjoying) Denison picking out some of his typically sleek motifs."
"I don't know if we were keeping him in the dark, so much as we were just kind of starting the process," Sims says from his own home in New York City. "Because, historically, the way we always wrote songs was, we would kind of come up with the music first and then show it to him.
Sims reveals, "He texted me and said, 'Are we making an album?' And I said, 'It sounds like fun to me!' By that point, yeah, Duane and Mac and I discussed it and then said, 'We'd like to do that.' That text exchange is what I consider a moment where David came on board."
Unlike his bandmates, Yow — an iconic frontman, idiosyncratically sardonic lyricist and singer, whose work Kurt Cobain deeply admired — had not made music a priority after the Jesus Lizard broke up.
He was previously a member of Qui, released a lone solo album (2013's Tonight You Look Like a Spider), toured with a reformed Flipper and indulged in the odd collaboration, but Yow mostly tended to other work, including acting and painting.
"I don't think they'll fess up to it, but I think it's because the three of them are actual musicians who need to play music to fulfill their lives," Yow says from his current home in Los Angeles, when asked about the seemingly surreptitious nature of the Jesus Lizard's latest batch of songwriting, "I don't have that need. I'd be perfectly happy to just be an actor or do paintings for the rest of my life. But I love those guys, and I love collaborating with them."
Nobody in the Jesus Lizard currently resides in the same city, which has led to a lot of remote collaboration.
"We used to all live together for quite a while at the beginning of the band," McNeilly says, from his home studio, just outside of Chicago. "And so, we were with each other all the time, and that's a really good way to keep things going. Then we were on the road so much that we ended up writing some stuff on the road, or at least tweaking it and getting an idea. Like, at sound checks, we might be able to work on some stuff."
He continues, "And I think I prefer getting together with the other guys, physically being in the same location more often than doing it remotely. When we got together, it was very intense; we would work all day for several days."
In our 2007 discussion about Qui, Yow mentioned that the band's Paul Christensen and Matt Cronk taught him a lot about singing well, and it's clear on Rack that that experience stuck with him. As the band finds the sweet spot between making ferocious new music that will satisfy expectations while sounding completely timeless, Yow, who can be an unsettling screamer and howler, is singing his ass off.
"Several years ago, Krist Novoselic emailed me and said, 'Hey, we need to talk,'" Yow recalls. "And he, Pat Smear, and Dave Grohl were going to do this Experience Music thing in Seattle. And it was going to be the first time they would have played together since Kurt killed himself. And Krist wanted me to be the singer. He said that he thought that Kurt would want me, and yeah, I was pretty blown away by that. So, I hired Paul, the guy from Qui to give me vocal lessons because a lot of the Nirvana stuff, like on 'Smells Like Teen Spirit, he's singing way higher than you realize."
In the end, the collab never took place: "When it got closer to the time that it was going to happen, Dave Grohl said, 'No, I don't want David Yow. I want Paul McCartney and Neil Young and shit like that," Yow recalls. "But [those singing lessons were] very helpful and gave me muscle memory in trying to match keys and tones and all of that. I mean, I don't want to pat myself on the back very much, but I'm proud of the way it sounds."
He adds, "Typically, I cringe when I hear myself, but I think the sound of my voice specifically on a handful of these songs — it sounds cool. It doesn't sound like Steve [Albini], but it reminds me of the sort of cool sound of Steve's voice, particularly in Big Black and Rapeman, where just the quality of the sound of his voice just sounds cool."
While Rack consists of 11 songs, the band say they recorded 14 songs, and that fans will hear the rest at some point. And there might even be more music by the Jesus Lizard beyond all of this.
"I think Duane is always working on ideas, and David Sims, I'm sure has some ideas," McNeilly says. "So, we'll probably talk about those at some point, Duane will play some things and get us all thinking and that'll be the seed that hopefully becomes something that grows, you know? We'll see."
As for Denison, he's proud of Rack and the quality control standards the Jesus Lizard implemented to make it.
"I had watched other bands put out what I call reunion albums," he says. "Everyone from Magazine to Bauhaus to the Pixies — all these different people came back together and put albums out and I listened to them, and I would think, 'Well, that was pretty good; that wasn't; that was a good one. Why did they do that?'"
He continies, "Kevin in Tomahawk [Denison's band after the Jesus Lizard] used to say, when something was [iffy], 'Somebody tell him.' Like, 'Will someone tell him?!' And I felt like maybe what happened with some of these groups is, they had become complacent or smug, or maybe there was the main guy who wrote everything, and no one was allowed to speak up, and as a result, to me, they put out albums with wildly varying quality. And to me, it was an advantage for us to be able to sit back and think of that"
Listen to these complete conversations with all four members of the Jesus Lizard on the Kreative Kontrol podcast: