The Jesus Lizard: Beautiful Is As Ugly Does

In any list of the most ferocious live rock-and-roll bands playing right now, you'd have to include the Jesus Lizard, the Chicago quartet who've assaulted the senses of underground rock, post-hardcore, prog-metal, and genital-mutilation fanatics across the country for the past eight years. With a major-label debut at their backs -- Shot (Capitol), their most cohesive, if not their most bombastic, release to date -- they broke into Cambridge on Sunday and Monday for a two-night stand at the 600-capacity Middle East downstairs. The Jesus Lizard mimicked the crassest elements of their reputation (which mainly have to do with singer David Yow's penchant for drunken exposure tactics and his infamous "tight & shiny" testicle gag) and then torpedoed them with an hour and a half of precision death-jazz pandemonium unseen and unheard of since the primitive heyday of the Stooges.

Yow, a five-foot-plus dervish whose receding hairline is flecked with gray, is certainly the closest monster this decade has to Iggy Pop. As rock crit Chuck Eddy once observed of the Stooges, the Lizard don't make the kind of music you can build "community" on (what subgenre/subculture punks demand); Yow's reactions are too personal, too idiosyncratic, and maybe too unsettling. On song one Sunday night -- "Seasick," from 1991's Goat (Touch and Go) -- he barreled head-first into the crowd (like a five-dollar whore, Yow spends most of his working nights on his back, hands a-grasping at his short & curlies). By the third number he'd surfed his way to the bar, where mid song he stomped down the tabletop past the mass of the crowd and started passing out free beers. He started Shot's topsy-turvy slide-guitar queasy smashfest "Thumbscrews" from the depths of the teeming slam pit, then charged back the length of the room without missing a lyric. Howling and sputtering like equal parts Johnny Rotten and deathbed-era Tiny Tim, Yow played staggering, escaped-primate chaos to his bandmates' focused, virtuoso ballistics. Bassist David Wm. Sims and new drummer Jim Kimball (ex-Mule) laid down bedrock search-and-destroy savagery; guitarist Duane Denison tore through coils of laser-precise riffage, peeling off sheets of free-associative tension in one second, scraping atomic jazzcore hybrid riffs in the next, maintaining a tone that was aggressive without mammoth distortion.

As the Lizard reached all the way back through their career -- to 1990's Head (Touch and Go) for the ultra-violent "Blockbuster," through much of Goat and '92's Liar (Touch and Go) -- they were brashly, venomously intense, insistently, cathartically brilliant. If you missed it, you missed as beautiful as ugly gets.

-- Carly Carioli