**1/2 The Jesus Lizard

BANG

(Touch and Go)

Not by any means the best, but simply the final, release by one of the finest and most iconoclastic punk bands of the '90s, whose explosive emergence at the decade's dawn, subsequent weighty influence on their more commercially successful brethren, and enduring lack of commercial potential despite critical and underground recognition of their apparent genius might function as some sort of parable for the tangled narrative arc that was indie-rock. Bang collects the Lizard's singles output -- including early live sides recorded in Boston -- without adding up to anything close to a best-of. (The definitive portrait of the band, always more effective live than in the studio, remains 1994's Show, recorded before they defected for an unhappy stint at Capitol).

There are few new insights here, but plenty of poisoned pleasures: as always, singer David Yow, muffled and incorrigible, occupying a warped condition of mind (drunk? confused? certifiable?) that consistently defies translation or any apparent satisfaction; a spidery, malevolent elegance lurking amid the grime; a rhythm section as bedrock as Zeppelin, as tricky as the JB's, and as ornery as Big Black. If there's a secret revealed, maybe it's in the opening Chrome medley, which would seem to place the Lizard -- oddly, but in retrospect squarely -- in a tradition that traces back as much to Chicago's particular post-industrial nihilism as to punk per se. And although you wouldn't normally associate the Lizard with minimalism, they cover two songs by German new-wavers Trio (of Volkswagen-commercial "Da Da Da" fame) -- perhaps the hidden reservoir for Duane Denison's sophisticated guitar playing, a fussy, particular formalism he brought to material as roughly vernacular as the Dicks' "Wheelchair Epidemic" and the band's own "Deaf as a Bat."

-- Carly Carioli