Teenage Jesus and the Jerks

★★★★★
Teenage Jesus and the Jerks
9:15 min • Migraine Records • 1979
Walter Beck reviews
…………………………………………………………………………………………

One of the noisiest and most atonal groups to come out of the brief No Wave music scene of the ’70s, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks broke new ground on what was and wasn’t music. This was violent, abrasive, a primal scream in the face of the dying original punk scene and a fuck you to the artsy arrogant post-punk movement that was beginning to spawn.

Opening with the forty-two second ‘Freud in Flop’, a rolling instrumental from bassist Jim Sclavunos and drummer Bradley Field, the album gets off to a surprisingly rhythmic, if noisy start. The off-center mix, pushing Sclavunos’ high end with Field’s deep, steady thump, paints a grim picture of things to come.

The instrumentals continue with the next cut, the one-minute jaunt, ‘Race Mixing’. The violent noise is pushed to even further extremes as Sclavunos pushes his bass through the meanest distortion ever laid to tape, beating his strings down hard, until he drowns out Field’s drums completely.

Vocalist Lydia Lunch finally comes in on the third track ‘Baby Doll’, a track that seems to forecast the rise of sludge metal as she barks out her vocals savagely behind a slow, dragging wall of feedback, intermixed with an almost tribal sounding drum rhythm peppered throughout. The band’s mix of atonal noise really begins to shine through on this cut.

Picking up where the previous track left off, ‘Burning Rubber’ again features Lunch’s barked vocals over a slow, crawling assault of noise and feedback. The peak of this cut comes near the end as the chaos builds up speed into a thundering, speed demon explosion during the final ten seconds.

Speaking of speed, the twenty-one second ‘Red Alert’ is a pure burner; another instrumental exercise in sonic violence from Sclavunos and Field.

The two and a half minute ‘Orphans’, the longest cut on the record, is definitely the highlight as the band approaches something nearly anthem-like. Backed by a pounding and steady beat, vocalist Lunch strains her pipes in a thumping shout, you can almost envision the crowd at a gig stomping their feet along, working themselves into a frenzy as the band lays out their most concise musical exercise,

Little orphans running thru the bloody snow,
Little orphans running thru the bloody snow,
Little orphans running thru the blood, thru the blood, thru the blood –

what does that mean? Maybe nothing at all, but in Lunch’s barking vocals, the message is heard, whatever it’s truly reality is.

The record comes to a close with ‘Less of Me’, a track that takes the band in a different direction, albeit still noisy as hell. There’s a squealing saxophone throughout the song, mixed in with Lunch’s stomping, barking vocals and Field’s stop-start drumming. It’s not listed on the album who is playing the sax, but the effect is amazing, sounding almost like jazz from the dirtiest corners of America.

In seven tracks and nine minutes total, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks left their indelible mark on the American underground, bringing noise music to new frontiers and setting the stage for the powerhouse sludge scene that would emerge in the next decade. Black Flag may get credit for mixing punk and feedback noise with the second half of their album My War, but Teenage Jesus and the Jerks did it first and they did it meaner than anyone before or since.