The Lounge Lizards

Found these guys because Tom Waits mentioned them in an interview and I totally get it. Great album, like progressive-fusion-lounge-lazz. Super talented group

What a great band, The Lounge Lizzards, John Lurie and company!

Excellent MP3 clarity. A must.

A progressive jazz sound.I purchased this from overseas .. it was very hard to find in the US.Arrived on time and in good shape.

Great

A master work. Know this album quite well but had never owned it. Very happy to now have a copy

I'm surprised there are so few reviews of this record. It is an essential album for the early 1980s New York music scene. John Lurie and his band set the soundtrack for the non-punk/new-wave/disco atmosphere of the city. This is avant garde jazz, but not like Ornette Coleman. It's got Lurie's quirky melodies (very Monk-ish; in fact, there are two Monk tracks on this record), and it has Arto Lindsay's frantic guitar, which takes the music from the more sedate jazz atmosphere to something just slightly strange. Lurie would become known as an actor, notably in movies by Jim Jarmusch, and would write music for Jarmuch's movies as well, and, unfortunately, no longer performs because of health issues. But this and other early Lounge Lizards albums were hugely influential in the early 1980s in NYC.

Long before John Zorn's blend of hardcore and jazz in Naked City, John Lurie put together this intense jazz-punk hybrid. It has a sleazy, gritty sound that shows the early development and experimentation of the long-running institution that is The Lounge Lizards.Lurie's sax plays many of the melodies, but perhaps more of a feature is the insane scraping sounds of Arto Lindsay's guitar and Evan Lurie wildly tinkering on the electric piano. Drummer Anton Fier's style sounds a bit more rock than jazz, which also adds to the punkiness.The material is mostly by John Lurie, and falls somewhere between sexy, loungy jazz ("Ballad", "You Haunt Me" and a pretty straight reading of Earle Hagen's "Harlem Nocturne") and upbeat crazy pieces ("Wangling", Thelonius Monk's "Well You Needn't" and "Epistrophy"), at times somewhat Frank Zappa-ish, as another review mentioned.Later incarnations of The Lounge Lizards saw Lurie adding more and more horns, then other instruments and eventually creating a more layered sound, which incorporated some elements of classical and African musics (among countless others). All of their work has been great, but this, their debut album still remains the most fresh and exciting.

Sometimes creepy, sometimes sleazy, never cheesy. Slightly post-punk inspired jazz from composer John Lurie. The Lounge Lizards' debut from 1981 is probably their most avant-garde work in comparison to their other records but it's still very accessible. Certainly not as weird as other fusion albums like John Zorn's Naked City. If you enjoy 70s and 80s post-punk (like Wire, The Fall etc...) and you're also into jazz (particularly Ornette Coleman and Coltrane, or cross-over artists like Acoustic Ladyland and Polar Bear) then this album will be right up your street.

Not their best album (to me it's Voice of Chunk) but an interesting mix of fusion, noise, free jazz and more classic noir atmosphere.

It’s the lounge lizards, I they got better, but like any true journey, the start is indispensable.

excellent

È un disco eccezionale