When Jay Reatard died in early 2010 at age 29, he was barely coming off his second solo album, Watch Me Fall, a strong follow-up to his stellar 2006 debut Blood Visions and one that seemed to pivot him in a new direction musically. Reatard released songs at a clip, so his discography was unwieldy ever since he was a teenager. But we wouldn’t get to hear his next phase, or see which of his old bands he’d revive for one-off festival reunions. We didn’t get anything else. It was over. It hurt.
The consolation was the music he left behind—he was in tons of bands. There’s always the opportunity to take in the Reatards’ teenage hate or savor the electro-punk bile he made as Terror Visions. He and Alicja Trout made some of the best music of their lives with the Lost Sounds. There were Final Solutions, the awesome early incarnation of Destruction Unit featuring Jay, and his ferocious one-and-done supergroup of sorts Bad Times. When even the low-stakes projects he put out ruled, it’s legitimately hard to know where to begin the deep dive. A few records have been reissued in the years following his death, and all of those aforementioned bands are listed on his long-dormant official website. But one band that’s conspicuously absent from that list is Angry Angles—a group that wasn't around long enough to get its due, and whose records haven’t been all that easy to find. With their collected recordings recently released by Goner Records, it’s an ideal time to consider a crucial chapter in Reatard's life and discography.
Angry Angles were Reatard's last band before he started recording pretty much everything by himself—the stepping stone between the Lost Sounds and Blood Visions. “To me that transition period was the best time,” said Zac Ives, co-head of Goner Records and Jay’s Final Solutions bandmate. “He was writing amazing hooks, and things got more melodic, but it still had this crazy edge that could run off the rails at any point and a ferocity no one else could do, especially with something that was poppy. It was my favorite band that he ever did.”
Alix Brown was living in Atlanta in 2004. Her band the Lids were touring with the Black Lips, and their first stop was a Memphis warehouse space. Brown, who knew of Reatard’s chaotic onstage reputation, met him for the first time there. “Really briefly, you know, nothing happened,” she said. “We were just like, ‘Oh hi.’ I don't know, I kind of felt something when we first met but didn't act on it.” He managed to track down her phone number and called to ask if he could visit her in Atlanta. “Kinda cute and romantic,” she recalled recently.
As Reatard began to pivot away from the Lost Sounds and his relationship with Trout ended, he decamped to Atlanta. Jay and Alix became romantically involved and started living together, along with Black Lips’ Jared Swilley and the Lids’ Mark Naumann. It was inevitable that the two would start making music, too. “We were just sitting around my apartment recording things, and then it dawned on me that we should put this out,” Brown said. “And then we started a record label.” In quick succession, they were sharing a roof, starting Angry Angles, and launching Shattered Records—an outlet for their own music and their friends’ bands. This period in Reatard’s life tracks with the rest of his biography: He never really took things slow, especially when it came to musical endeavors.
Angry Angles’ covers give a good sense of the influences at the heart of the project. With their take on the Oblivians’ “Memphis Creep,” there’s the Memphis garage rock aggression that always seemed to pump through Reatard's veins. Their cover of Wire’s “The 15th” showed that the thrills weren’t always loud or fast; the song is patient and beautiful, building tension without getting loud or gnarly. They’re stilted, powerful weirdos on their version of Devo’s “Blockhead.” (Devo are crucial to the band’s DNA—they got the band’s name from a misheard Devo lyric.) This was the music Jay and Alix were listening to together, and for Jay, it was a return to punk after years of focusing on the Lost Sounds’ synth-heavy barrage. By all accounts, Jay’s creative relationship with Alix was significantly less intense than the one he was coming out of with the Lost Sounds.
“I think looking at the music that they made, the Lost Sounds were two bulls running head on into each other,” said Eric Friedl, the co-head of Goner Records and the Oblivians. “Alicja and Jay both had really strong ideas, and they were pretty much equal partners in the band. And it was a really big complicated thing—they had eight-minute songs and that kind of stuff. [Angry Angles] is a reaction to that.”
In 2005, the Lost Sounds were gearing up for a tour in Europe. According to drummer Rich Crook, Reatard’s heart wasn’t in it, so he called his bandmates and said he wouldn’t tour. When he finally decided to go, things went bad. There were blow-ups and walk-offs. “On that last tour, him and Alicja were hitting each other,” Brown said. “It got really dark." When Jay came back, he had a black eye. This was the impetus for one of Angry Angles’ best songs, “You Call It Love.” On the single’s artwork, now repurposed as the recent Goner compilation’s cover, both Jay and Alix have black eyes. “Baby when you hit me / It felt so good,” they sing.
During a self-described “dark” period when he was holed up in Atlanta, shaking off the final days of the Lost Sounds and beginning this new chapter, Reatard wrote and recorded Blood Visions. It was an album about violent, murderous revenge—a critical statement in his solo career that would ultimately clear a path to success. He didn’t anticipate the album receiving any attention. According to Larry Hardy, the head of In the Red Records (which initially released Blood Visions), Reatard had no plans to promote or tour behind the album. Instead, he wanted to focus on making an Angry Angles album and performing Blood Visions tracks with Brown—seamless additions to the band’s repertoire. The music and themes from that record were undeniably similar to Angry Angles stuff like “You Fell In," a revenge-fueled love song based on the 1981 horror movie The Pit.
After about six months of living together in Atlanta, Jay and Alix moved to Memphis right before Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005—a fact Alix remembers because she was mulling a move to New Orleans at the time. “I hated it at first,” she said of living in Memphis. “I was so bummed. I missed a lot of my friends in Atlanta. But I ended up really falling in love with Memphis.” For a short period, the band’s lineup was rounded out by two members of the New Orleans band Die Rotzz, who had relocated to Memphis following Katrina. Destruction Unit’s Ryan Rousseau, who was also a member of the Reatards, was their most consistent live drummer.
Jay and Alix; photo by Mark Murrmann
In their year as a bonafide Memphis band (rather than one that just sounds like it), Angry Angles toured the States and Europe. Near the end of their run, in September 2006, they got an unusual offer. Chris Thief, a Montreal guy who worked in a recording studio called hotel2tango, wanted to record and self-release a split with Angry Angles and the Fatals. Since Reatard didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to play Canada, the band got on a plane and headed there. “I mean, no one recorded Jay—he always recorded himself,” Goner’s Ives said. “The idea that someone else was going to do it seemed a little crazy, but he wanted to play in Canada, so they did it.”
Before they started recording, they played two shows: One in Toronto, and then another in Montreal. The Toronto show on September 8 was a “disaster,” according to Rousseau. “Jay was in one of his freak-out modes,” he said. “I don't know if Alix was fucking up or what, but we played like three songs and he stormed off the stage. And I was blackout drunk.” They arrived to the Montreal session in bad shape, with only one song planned. “Jay was so hungover and fucked up, and nobody was really into recording, so we just made some shit up,” Rousseau added. They recorded three tracks total.
When they got back home, Jay and Alix found the recordings in their email. “Jay fucking hated them,” Brown said. They decided that the songs felt underdeveloped and told the guy not to release them. (“Sorry, Jay, if you might be mad at me for putting them out now,” Brown added.) One of the songs from that session, an early version of “Can’t Do It Anymore,” would appear on Reatard’s final album, Watch Me Fall. When it eventually came out, Brown wasn’t happy to hear his solo version. “He never even asked me if that was OK or anything,” she said. “I was like, ‘That fucker!’ I wrote one of the bass parts for that song. Thanks Jay.”
Things seemed to be moving forward for Angry Angles. They were touring, and to capitalize on their string of singles, they lined up a deal to record an album for In the Red Records. Then, things changed. Blood Visions started getting attention and Jay’s relationship with Alix began to cool. “We got along fine,” she said of their relationship at that time (late 2006). “I don't know, maybe it was too fine. We were just becoming friends, and not lovers, you know? We were more just bandmates.” They broke up, which effectively put an end to the band.
Since Reatard had already collected an advance from In the Red, labelhead Hardy tried to convince him to get in the studio with Brown. “It was me bugging him way after he and Alix weren’t a couple anymore,” Hardy said. “I could tell he didn’t want to think about it, but he’d already taken money from me to do it.” They wound up trying to do re-record some of their earlier singles for an album, which is how the previously unreleased version of “Things Are Moving” happened. But Hardy could tell that Reatard approached the recording sessions “begrudgingly”—his heart wasn’t in it. “We tried to re-record stuff, but it was just hard for us to… I don't know, to be together,” Brown said. That was it. Angry Angles was done, and Jay Reatard was a solo artist, soon to sign with Matador. There wasn’t a big dramatic blow-up like the end of the Lost Sounds—it all just kind of stopped.
After Reatard died, Ives went through his hard drive, catalogued everything, and put it away. Finally, last year, he felt up for going back through some the files. That’s when he revisited Angry Angles. In addition to collecting their out-of-print singles, he pulled the lost album version of “Things Are Moving,” an unreleased live session, and the rare Oblivians cover. “Jay's big thing was he wanted his music out there, to be available, and for people to be able to listen to it,” Ives said. “Those are the words that I still hearing ringing in my head when I'm working on this stuff.” Goner got in touch with Brown, who agreed to help put the compilation together.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy going back to that material, though. “It's pretty hard listening to it,” Brown said. “It still gets me kind of emotional, you know? I feel like the songs are really good. Even though it wasn't that long of a band, I think, to me, it's just as relevant as anything else that I've done because it was so emotional and so involved because of how we were with each other. It was kind of just something marking our time that we were spending.”
Last year, Lost Sounds members reformed and played their old songs under the name Sweet Knives. Brown has ruled out the possibility of performing Angry Angles songs, so the Goner compilation is it. When Brown discusses their history—their specific singles and timeline—she said her memories surrounding the band are “really blurry.” This was a decade ago, and it was an emotionally loaded time. “I don’t know,” she said, “I mean, it's hard to talk about Jay.”