TS: Goat vs Liar (Jesus Lizard albums)

Liar has Gladiator, so there.

LIAR

goat

its a tie.

LIAR, for Puss and The Art of Self-Defense alone

It's Goat. But Liar is excellent, and more brutal.

The production on Goat is better, and the songs cover more ground.

Liar, just barely.

Liar for Boilermaker, Puss, Slave Ship etc etc... but GOAT is pretty immense too (NUB)

need to hear more jesus lizrd i've had goat on repeat for like two weeks now and it is fucking awes

DON'T GET ME WRONG HE'S A NICE GUY I LIKE HIM JUST FINE

goat is their masterpiece. and my favorite. i probably prefer head to liar. but liar is boss too. don't get me wrong. goat is pretty much perfect from front to back.

"The production on Goat is better"

quite the opposite i'd say!

the dirty,thicker sound in Liar is what makes it a little better than Goat imo

i haven't heard liar yet but i doubt that it stands the slightest chance against goat.

chill reasoning

liar btw. fucking love goat, as should we all, but i've always been a little confused by the goat-as-singular-achievement narrative.

Side two of Liar tapers off a little (relative to Goat, which is consistent from beginning to end), but side one is so fucking great that I don't care. I suspect I prefer it for the same reasons that Goat is so often celebrated as the singular achievement: at its best, it's less chaotic and more catchy. Therefore, it's not "the perfect Jesus Lizard record" like Goat, but I enjoy it more.

i don't think its a singular achievement. they did cool things before and after goat. including an album's worth of amazing singles. but there is a reason why goat stands for greatest of all time. it really is their finest hour. every song is so strong.

x-post

yeah i mean i feel you - it is really an amazing album! i guess liar's highs just seem a lil higher to me.

Goat.

Liar.

"The production on Goat is better"

quite the opposite i'd say!

the dirty,thicker sound in Liar is what makes it a little better than Goat imo

― Zeno, Wednesday, October 28, 2009 8:05 AM (4 hours ago)

^^ yeah, this.

also, Liar has "Zachariah" which gives it a kind of nice 'Physical Graffiti' vibe

Production always sounded better on Goat to me. Guess this is a matter of taste.

There's a delirious, fever dream sort of quality to Goat that I really dig.

(I might have ripped that off from somewhere, but it's otm.)

Chunkier rhythm section on Goat wins it for me, although they're both great and it was a close run thing.

yeah jesus this is tough, and i posit HEAD as up there in the same critical-jambalaya.

ummmm fuck

hmmmm

okay LIAR by a hair over GOAT, even though "then comes dudley" was the best part of their live show two weeks ago.

I guess the music is dirty enough that the clearer production on Goat works better for me. Liar kicks tons of ass, but it's just a bit murky.

I like Head much more than either of these. didn't get much into Goat or Liar, but then again I didn't get much into the Jesus Lizard.

one last thing to defend Liar over Goat's production:

in perspective of 19 years since it's release date,Goat's production soudns like one out of many Steve Albini produced records of that period of time (though he didnt produce Goat), while Liar sounds much more special with it's heavy,bombastic,chaotic production,that resemble The Birthday Party-Mutiny era sound, but it's harder to find other examples to compare.
plus,wtf,the 2nd half of Liar is awesome.

plus, wtf, every track from seasick to rodeo and joliet is completely unfuckwithable

i always skip Karpis

Liar also get points fot awesome cover art:

http://img3.nnm.ru/8/e/8/0/e/8e80efebc1ece00cb24b3ce38b47f2a5_full.jpg

while Goat loses some points for this:
http://www.southern.com/southern/band/JESLZ/pics/17768L.jpg

mad rong

one last thing to defend Liar over Goat's production:

in perspective of 19 years since it's release date,Goat's production soudns like one out of many Steve Albini produced records of that period of time (though he didnt produce Goat), while Liar sounds much more special with it's heavy,bombastic,chaotic production,that resemble The Birthday Party-Mutiny era sound, but it's harder to find other examples to compare.
plus,wtf,the 2nd half of Liar is awesome.

― Zeno, Monday, November 2, 2009 9:14 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark

are you just saying that albini didnt "produce" GOAT, he "recorded" it? because he definitely recorded it.

xp i do like LIAR's artwork better, but the GOAT artwork is rad, too.

yeah,i've checked and you are right, but it doesnt matter to my point
xpost

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I suspect it all comes down to which you heard first, right? Because I certainly listened to Goat a hundred times before Liar came out.

^That's how it worked for me^, plus Goat has Nub, which more than maybe any of their other songs highlights how perfect every member of the band is.

^^this plus my copy of Liar vanished like six months later or something

monkey trick is probably my fave jl song ever.

It's sorta like their Dirt?? Man the fucking guitar on that song. That one part. You know what I'm talking about.

yeah i mean i feel you - it is really an amazing album! i guess liar's highs just seem a lil higher to me.

― pretzel walrus, Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Not counting the highs that are Monkey Trick, Mouth Breather, and Then Comes Dudley. I love Liar to pieces, but none of it is as good as those three songs. Close--really, really close--but not quite.

Voted Goat. If Mouth Breather was on Liar, Liar would have won.

weird i almost never listen to the first 3 tracks on goat and their about the three most namechecked here

Well, it seems I am trending with recent logic: Liar for me mainly because "Gladiator" just endlessly fascinates me. Really, I don't want to have to choose (I had both of these on a single cassette in my car for a long time). Seems the reissue of Liar has some live bonus tracks, or just alternate versions, whatever, but it is really funny to me that the two versions of "Gladiator" differ in track length by a second. One second.

The first time I saw them live was Liar tour in '92 (an as yet unknown Jon Spencer BX opened). I screamed "Monkey Trick" at them between each song. Finally, they came back for an encore and played it.

On this reunion tour, it was also the first song of their encore.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Nice!

well done upsetting the canon ilm

Show was the only jesus lizard album available from BMG get 10 CDs for 1 music club
isn't that worth a few more votes?

i think the canon put Goat just a tiny bit upper from Liar, so it's not really upsetting the canon.

pfrk gave goat 9.3 while liar 9.2
in rym both get exactly 3.97
if that means something
xpost

Okay, Head, Down and Show are great too, but this was all about Goat vs. Liar xpost

They might as well be a double album.

they were KILLER in chapel hill last night. pretty much every song offa these two made an appearance. THEY ALSO DID "CHROME" AND "WHEELCHAIR EPIDEMIC." seven song encore! SO AWESOME.

best bit of banter was probably: "you know how every newspaper now says we're the best band ever? well, that's not really true. but this is the best song ever written." (band plays "monkey trick")

I wonder why I really like Jesus Lizard and really tend to hate bands that are influenced/rip off Jesus Lizard.

Way back when, I lost a writer once by flatly refusing to accept that Big Black was a better band than Jesus Lizard. It was one of those weird bar discussions that suddenly gets really serious, and then he's like, well, fuck you, I'm never writing for you again. Which is OK, I guess, as he ended up writing for better magazines than ours anyway.

But I still think Jesus Lizard is way better.

Maybe, but they also released Down, Shot and Blue. Some points have to be deducted for those, at least. Brilliant though their first 4 or 5 albums might be.

But Live they was really the elemnt they thrived in. Every time I saw them back in the day they were incredible. Did nay one see them around 'Blue' era? I think I saw them three times lastly around the Shot times and they were still awesome. What a rhythm section.