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P.W. Long and DK3: Lizard Tales

When drummer Mac McNeilly bowed out of the Jesus Lizard after recording their major-label debut, Shot (Capitol), the Lizard turned to former Laughing Hyenas/Mule drummer Jim Kimball to fill the slot. Kimball was the natural choice -- he'd left Mule in 1993 to form the Denison/Kimball Trio, a jazz-duo side project of Lizard guitarist Duane Denison. Earlier this year, McNeilly completed a belated one-for-one trade when he signed up to drum behind former Mule singer/guitarist Preston Long's solo project (officially dubbed P.W. Long's Reelfoot, and coming to the Middle East next Thursday). Both groups have new albums on Touch & Go (the first for Long flying solo, the third by Denison/Kimball), and both offer elaboration on the underlying quirks that put Mule and the Lizard at the top of the post-aggro scrapheap.

If Mule's curly Southern-rock bent and occasional country inflections made them something like the Skynyrd of the post-Big Black indie set, Reelfoot's We Missed You on Sunday recasts Long as a straight-faced roots disciple. There's spare country blues laced with the arsenic timbres of old-time backwoods Appalachian folk. There are a couple of traditional tunes -- one a sizzling electrified bluegrass stampede, the other an acoustic rendition of what sounds like an Elizabethan folk ballad, with lone-fiddle accompaniment by Robby Fulks sideman Casey Dreissen -- and some raw-boned full-band country rock when McNeilly and bassist Dan Maister kick in. Fully half the album is just Long and his acoustic, rustling up rustic ballads with rough-hewn picking and his husky, whiskey-and-cigarette-scarred creak and moan twisted into the pinched nasal inflections of a hill-country songster.

Much of We Missed You is about penitence -- or at least about the desire for penitence, though Long, vehemently secular fundamentalist that he is, ends up rejecting it at almost every turn. "Now my heart is frail, and some find me mean," he bays on "Oleander," "If you find me pale and my vision obscene/If you find me drunk and my tales too tall/Could you leave me to lay, Lord, if you find me at all?" There are testimonials to his dead mother, his dog, and a dead friend -- all of them heartbreaking -- and though there's awful, aching remorse, salvation is ever-elusive. "My body is a temple . . . in its worldly pleasures I've found sanctuary," he sings on the gospel/soul-revival "Temple," with church organ by 5ive Style's Jeremy Jacobsen. "Someday I will stand before Him, and try to explain." So it's also about accepting the consequences -- which maybe gets stated best on the last track, the traditional "Jack of Diamonds." This is a defiantly bawdy old-time gamblin' and drinkin' tune, but Long sings it full of veiled sorrow and resignation -- a sinner falling back on his stubborn pride as a last defense, but finding it less than comforting.

The Denison/Kimball Trio's Neutrons (out August 12) -- here credited to DK3, a moniker that prompts sudden flashes of Calvin Kline's androgynous scent and the new album by En Vogue -- allows Denison, on bass and guitars, to flex his conservatory-trained muscles. They get a vigorous workout on "Monte's Casino" and on the swinging, cinematic crime jazz of "Landshark Pt. 2," with Ken Vandermark's raunchy reeds giving Denison and Kimball a helping hand down into the gutter. And though there are some weird moments -- "Heavy Water" develops into a cinematic drone-laden one-act play à la John Zorn's Elegy -- Denison's pummeling, Lizard-skinned bass lines anchor the songs enough to make them accessible to even the most improv-wary souls.

-- Carly Carioli

(P.W. Long's Reelfoot headline upstairs at the Middle East next Thursday, August 7; call 864-EAST.)