Consumer Guide Album

The Lounge Lizards: The Lounge Lizards [Editions EG, 1981]
John Lurie has a real gift for night-crawling high-kitsch themes, but to hear him improvise alongside Arto Lindsay is to learn how hard it is to make music out of noise. After all, it's the precisely timed cut-'em-up verve with which Arto skronks and gweezes into the themes that gives the Lizards their edge. But for some reason--weak takes? rushed mix? Lurie's sense of posterity? vanity, perhaps?--he's all but inaudible on many cuts here. Result: Slaughter on Tenth Avenue Goes to the Mudd Club--fun, but not the real fake. B+