Jay Reatard

Essential Albums

  • Blood Visions
    Blood Visions
    Blood Visions

    Anyone who doubts the internal worlds available to something as simple as garage punk would do well to spend a half-hour in the slaughterhouse of Jay Reatard’s manic 2006 album, Blood Visions. Recorded piece by piece by a freakishly productive high-school dropout from Memphis—one who was exploring what he later called a “really, really bad place in my life”—Blood Visions has the isolated patina of a private-press folk album or New-Age oddity otherwise lost to time. This is music so profoundly lonely, it feels both more deranged and more tender in its desperation to connect. The 15 songs here are short and catchy, and the mood is perpetually violent. Imagine The Misfits without the macho campiness. Or the Ramones narrating the vague haze of straight-to-VHS horror movies in a faux-British accent that gets funnier in direct proportion to the awfulness of its crimes. And like good horror, the constraints of Reatard’s music—both financial and formal—only make the album’s ability to touch the nether regions of the human psyche more unsettling, whether he’s shouting down the voices in his head (“Death Is Forming”) or looking at family photos in a darkened hallway before killing everyone in them, one by one (“My Family”). What the Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady did for pop punk’s exhaustion of human romance, Blood Visions does for the fantasy—however occasional—of murdering everyone you know. Anyone interested in early-2000s garage rock should know Blood Visions, as should anyone interested in the pitch-perfect genre exploitation of artists like Ty Segall or OCS. But it’s also an album you could get into if you like early Metallica and thrash, or the Geto Boys, or the brain-dead brilliance of a rapper like Playboi Carti: This is music made for and by the lizard brain. Tragically, Reatard didn’t make it to 30—he died in 2010, at 29—but Blood Visions feels eternal. “Time may heal wounds/But I will kill you,” he sings on “Fading All Away.” And that’s a promise.

Albums

Music Videos

Artist Playlists

Singles & EPs

About Jay Reatard

For about a dozen years, from 1998 up to his tragic death in 2010, Jay Reatard was one of the most ferociously innovative garage punks on the planet. Born James Lee Lindsey Jr. in 1980, the singer and guitarist was still a teenager when his first band, the infamously christened Reatards, began tearing up Memphis’ legendary garage-rock scene with static-smothered anthems of angst and loathing inspired by their hometown heroes the Oblivians. Developing a reputation as a brilliant musician who could be violently unpredictable onstage, he would burn through a string of projects—including the synth-punk-informed Lost Sounds, Bad Times, and Final Solutions—before dropping his 2006 solo debut, Blood Visions, on In the Red Records. While the album unloads plenty of crude distortion, the brilliant tension between Jay Reatard’s darkly gonzo storytelling and growing knack for art-punk hooks made it a breakout hit. A deluge of singles soon followed, as well as 2009’s jangly Watch Me Fall, his second full-length and first for Matador Records. It seemed as if Jay Reatard was on the verge of mainstream recognition when an overdose claimed his life at the age of 29.

HOMETOWN
Lilbourn, MO, United States
BORN
May 1, 1980
GENRE
Alternative

Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada