If you try to tap your foot along with this record, you'll sprain a toe. If you try to relax to it, you'll twitch off the couch. And if you try to dance to it, you'll put yourself in traction. There is indeed plenty going on here in the arcane medium that Lizard leader John Lurie calls "fake jazz." (Part of the five-man band plays jazz, he once explained, while the other part is "playing noise.") Lurie himself wields an admirable mock-'50s progressive sax, and there is an interaction, even in the electronically cacophonous passages, that is more creatively musical than a lot of the current homogenized jazz-rock fusion. Lurie and his keyboardist brother Evan were born in Minneapolis, bassist Steve Piccolo comes from New Hampshire, guitarist Arto Lindsay from Virginia and drummer Anton Fier from Cleveland. Now they play mostly around New York, but as this debut LP shows, their style is from nowhere. That is, in this case, no insult.
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