What’s the perfect sonic partnership to a night laden with indie-loving hipsters, warm beer and the stench of a thousand cigarettes all coalescing into one giant, smokey fist choking the life out of the Chicago skyline?
The Jesus Lizard, of course.
photo via g33kgrrlI see plenty of heads-a-boppin’ and toes-a-tappin’, yet it seems completely ridiculous in this reviewer’s mind to assume that anyone here, at the 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival, is a real fan of The Jesus Lizard (save for that lanky bald guy up a few rows). David Yow’s primal screams and gutteral emissions seem to scare more than please, and perhaps that’s the point; the sparse humor between numbers serves as one more layer of irony to a slightly ironic setting on the one Friday of the summer you wish for clear skies and open roads and get rain and traffic jams instead. Despite all that, I’m convinced that The Jesus Lizard’s performance will prove to be one of the highlights of this summer’s Pitchfork Festival.
Over a decade passed fairly silently following The Jesus Lizard’s final show in 1999, with guitarist Duane Denison forming his own collaborative outing and David Yow reforming the Austin based noise rock band Scratch Acid. This summer’s Pitchfork Festival marks the first performance in ten years by the newly-reunited The Jesus Lizard, and the band hardly skips a beat. Denison’s growling guitar fills Union Park with the raw grind of early nineties-era noise rock, while Yow reinforces the assault with plenty of crowd-surfing/taunting. It’s enough to make you wonder if indeed this is the same Pitchfork that welcomed Fleet Foxes’ sixties psychedelic aesthetic just a year ago.
Much can easily be said about a band like The Jesus Lizard, but what’s difficult to say is whether you can ever be too old to rock. Nonetheless, if you’re a child of the nineties, celebration is in order, and it’s definitely a good sign that grunge-era bands like The Jesus Lizard can still draw quite a crowd.
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"it seems completely ridiculous in this reviewer’s mind to assume that anyone here, at the 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival, is a real fan of The Jesus Lizard."
Wat? Your statement is completely ridiculous. Did you not hear all the folks singing along? The cheers? The encore?
What's this nonsense about irony? They are pure energy and rock. They don't require someone to analyze or consider how good they are, unlike the rest of this low-energy boring crap cluttering trendfork's lineup.
It's also fairly laughable to stoop to referring to the grunge-era when TJL began in the eighties and were about as outside of that nonsense musically as you could be. Yes, they played guitars and drums and were loud. Similarities over.
David Yow is older but still can rock the bass. He antics on the old stage is something I'd love to see. I'd seen a blog the other day that has a pretty cool interview with him.
Check it out at:
http://blog.indiepit.com/2009/07/20/david-yows-blockbuster-interview-my-...
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