The Jesus Lizard
Rack
Ipecac
At some point, years ago, I clicked on a short video with a CAD animation demonstrating some mechanism involving gears, worm screws, cams, and levers that performed a complicated recurring motion, the kind of thing that is used in manufacturing lines to make an ice cream sandwich or carve a chess piece out of a block of wood. This ticked some checkbox on some server somewhere, and now my timeline shows me new weird mechanisms every day.
You know where this is going: the Jesus Lizard have returned with a new album, Rack, and while it follows the four-letter title convention of previous albums and is similarly filled with songs that are complex, precise, and yes, implacable mechanisms, it should be noted that it’s been a 27-year hiatus between albums. A talented but troubled musician could have been born, become world-famous, and expired in that timespan, but the Jesus Lizard appear to have been preserved in a nitrogen atmosphere and a thin coating of mineral oil to emerge decades later a smoothly-reciprocating aggressive rock machine.
Clearly, I can go on and on about how this band has stood by, locked out like a great hulking contraption responsible for workplace accidents and OSHA violations, waiting for the completion of that final work order to resume its limb-mangling and eardrum-pounding ways. Have the intervening years softened its mechanisms, introduced new vibrations, or lowered tolerances to the point of noticeable imprecision? Not at all. Put your headphones on, press play, and gently lower yourself into the machine.
https://www.ipecac.com/artists/the-jesus-lizard
