Today's Hotness: Assembly Now, Answering Machine, Qui, Silver Jews

>> The electronically affable (we've only ever "met" him via email) Lush, drummer for London indie rock quartet Assembly Now, is now the former drummer for London indie rock quartet Assembly Now. Lush chalks his departure up to musical differences in a departure message to fans. In his stead for the foreseeable future (or at least foreseeable from across the Atlantic) will be John Sutton, brother to current bassist Howard Sutton, meaning now perhaps the rhythm section will have some sort of fraternal telepathy. Or maybe they will just pound each other like the Davies, Robinson and Gallagher brothers. Either way it will be exciting, no? We bid a fond farewell to Lush, who happily answered our questions when we featured Assembly Now in our on-again, off-again featurette Show Us Yours. Check out Show Us Yours #6 featuring Assembly Now here. The band's most recent release, the single "Graphs, Maps & Trees," was issued on the Kids label Aug. 6. Lush drummed on some pretty great singles. Here are the a-sides of the first two.

Assembly Now -- "It's Magnetic" -- "It's Magnetic" b/w "Out On 24s"
Assembly Now -- "Leigh-On-Sea" -- "Leigh-On-Sea" b/w "Tenement"
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[buy the "Leigh-On-Sea" and "Graphs, Maps & Trees" singles from ITunes here]

>> According to a recent interview in the 'zine Noize Makes Enemies, The Answering Machine's next single will likely be for a track called "Light Bulb." According to the parley with band fronter Martin, the track was produced by Robin Houseman, who also produced the Manchester, England-based quartet's excellent "Silent Hotels" single, which streeted June 18 and sold out its vinyl edition of 500 in two days. According to the interview The Answering Machine's next single will be out in November. Will new drummer Ben play on it? We guess we'll find out in a couple months. In the meantime, kids in the UK have scads of chances to see the band live. Check out all the tour dates at the band's MySpace teepee here.

>> More news out of the Johnny Foreigner camp... so the signing was with Best Before as we expected. If you are a "friend" of "the band" on "MySpace" then you got the awesome bulletin the band sent out Friday night showing their names (and BLOOD) on the proverbial dotted line, as well as some shots of the recent recording session at Southern Studios and sundry other scruffy label and A&R types. The planned EP Arcs Across The City may be more of a November thing, as opposed to October, according to the latest missive, and is going to come in a cool package with pop-up art. Did we mention the Southern Sessions were recorded by a fellow named Harvey Birrell, whose credits include the Irish act Therapy? (whose song "Teethgrinder" errr, "Screamager" is totally the band's best jam). After stalking them via the Internet for half a year, we are hoping to get a proper interview with Johnny Foreigner later this fall. Watch this space.

>> Drowned In Sound has an informative and amusing interview with badman rocker David Yow, former fronter of The Jesus Lizard and newest addition to the trio Qui, here. Qui's record Love's Miracle streets next week on Ipecac. To hear Yow tell it, since leaving The Jesus Lizard he's spent most of his time drinking too much and playing with Photoshop. On the new record Yow is mostly singing vocal parts writting by Qui's Matt, but the now trio did write one song together, "Today, Gestation." We reviewed a recently released The Jesus Lizard live DVD here, and our foreign correspondent Zoz reviewed a Qui live date in January here.

>> More news from Drowned In Sound, who are really holding shizz down lately, no? The site reports that there will be a new Silver Jews record in 2008. The band, led by troubled poet David Berman, was to have finished recording the set last month and may be released as soon as January. More details are here.

Review: The Jesus Lizard -- Live [DVD]

In July 1993 we traveled north and east from the Philly 'burbs to erstwhile Trenton-based punk club City Gardens, where we saw abrasive, in-your-face and loud sets from The Jesus Lizard and New York quartet Helmet. Chicago-based The Jesus Lizard was supporting the release of the live set Show and the forthcoming Down. At that point our only familiarity with the grindy band was the fact that it had released a split single with Nirvana and had a reputation as being a volatile live act. By the end of the show we and our posse were more familiar with dynamic and almost dangerous fronter David Yow than we could have possibly expected. First, Mr. Yow picked our compatriot Lars' nose on stage when Lars tried to turn a stage dive into an opportunity for a handshake with his idol. Secondly, at one point Yow dropped trou, turned to face the drum kit and exposed... well -- it may be worse than you are thinking, but not much worse. We remember wondering if a law had been broken.

Anyway, when we saw that MVD was releasing a live DVD of The Jesus Lizard largely recorded a year later in October 1994 (some bonus material was recorded two years prior at CBGB's) we jumped at the chance to see it, as it is as close as we can get to reliving the chaotic set we had scene those many years ago in Trenton (motto: "Trenton Makes, The World Takes"). The fact that the set on the DVD was filmed (with different camera angles, to boot) in our adopted home of Boston, Mass. at the now defunct Venus de Milo club (which, incidentally, had hosted Radiohead's first U.S. show ever about 16 months prior) is icing on the cake.

The performances on "The Jesus Lizard -- Live" are easily as compelling as the live spectacle we recall. We found ourselves almost flinching as Yow launched himself into a crowd like so much snotty, sinewy ordnance when watching the video (a reaction typically only elicited by watching collegiate wrestling). The performances of "Bloody Mary" and "Nub" are particularly demented. While the trio playing instruments impressively lays down angular, ball-and-socket tight grooves worthy of much attention, it is hard not to focus on the antics of Yow. He spends the set wrestling the front rows of the audience. He crowd surfs, paces, spits and picks his nose, pausing between tunes to pull off of bottles of Budweiser. He demeans fans wearing earplugs, demands certain audience members are ejected, gets someone else's blood on his pants and holds his vocal mic to the bass cabinet. In short, he acts like the madman everyone told you about. Imagine if you took a speared bull from the bullring and dropped it in the first few rows of a hardcore show -- that's the sort of mayhem Yow creates. It makes for great video -- and you can watch a clip from the DVD right here:


The disc also includes a pretty interesting interview with Yow and Boston radio personality Shred. They discuss how The Jesus Lizard rebuffed advances from Atlantic Records by demanding huge amounts of cash for one record deals (the band ultimately signed to Capitol later in the '90s). Yow also goes off on how MTV sucked in 1994 and how the network demanded The Jesus Lizard edit its videos -- we can only imagine what Yow must think now. Attentive readers will recall that the Lars mentioned supra caught up with Yow's latest efforts as the vocalist for Qui in January; here is Lars' review of the show.

"The Jesus Lizard -- Live" was released June 5. You can buy it from Newbury Comics right here.

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