Jay Reatard

Essential Albums

  • 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.

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About Jay Reatard

Memphis punk prodigy Jay Reatard formed his band the Reatards at the tender of age of 15 and quickly became a legend in his hometown. He formed the synth/punk band Lost Sounds a few years later, and indulged his interest in lo-tech mayhem even further with Terror Visions. However, it was with his 2006 solo masterpiece, Blood Visions, that Reatard made his name. The album was a brisk, tightly wound explosion of punk, pop, noise, and new wave that marked the unhinged rocker as an expert songwriter, musician, and producer. Reatard continued to play in a variety of side projects and release music at a shocking clip until his tragic death in early 2010.

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

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