I first heard the Lounge Lizards on the First Edition sampler, but it obviously wasn't love at first hearing, because it must have been another four or five years before I bought this CD of their first album. I'm not sure when I might have made the connection between John Lurie, the leader of the Lounge Lizards, and John Lurie, the actor in Stranger Than Paradise — a film that was very fashionable at the time it came out, but which I just didn't get at all.
The excellent Destination:Out blog featured The Lounge Lizards a couple of weeks ago. They comment on the Lizards' self-description as "fake jazz", and question whether the fake-ness is genuine or, well, fake. My guess is that it just wasn't the done thing in New York at the time to take jazz too seriously, so they had to affect some postmodern distance. Or it could be, as Destination:Out says, that they were just hedging their bets. The sound is jazz with a similar attitude to John Zorn's plus Art Lindsay's guitar, which brings a taste of the New York No Wave scene.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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