/|\(;,;)/|\ There's an ocean of music, and I'm swimming as hard as I can. I use this blog to post music & commentary; I hope you find something here that does it for you. Peace!
Doc Shoe posting on bonus-tunes:
Here’s the Lost Sounds demo for their song “Blackcoats Whitefear” (album version HERE) featuring the talents of Alicja Trout and the late great Jay Reatard. The completed studio version of this song is like a amphetamine freak tearing down your front door with an axe, but the demo is more deliberate, with more obvious shades of early Synth Punk pioneers like Devo and The Screamers. Damn, I miss this band.
“Plastic Skin” by Lost Sounds
Jay Reatard and Alicja Trout combine Screamers-style Synth-Punk with apocalyptic Garage Rock.
“Energy Drink & the Long Walk Home” by Lost Sounds
Jay Reatard was a motherfucking genius, but Lost Sounds was as much Alicja Trout’s band as it was his. “We both have this apocalyptic mentality,” is how she once explained their chemistry. Just listen to her sing this track and I think you’ll get what an “apocalyptic mentality” sounds like. (Hint: It sounds awesome.)
“Punish Or Be Damned” by Lost Sounds
If you need any further reason to check out Jay Reatard’s band Lost Sounds, dig this: Even their outtakes make for better listening than most other bands on their best day. Here’s Jay, Alicja Trout, and the rest of the crew covering their under-appreciated Synth-Punk forebears: The Screamers’ “Punish Or Be Damned.”
“Heart Felt Toys” by Lost Sounds
With the possible exception of Final Solutions, I’d have to say my favorite Jay Reatard band has got to be Lost Sounds (though to call it a “Jay Reatard band” is unfair to the contributions of Alicja Trout, who’s an amazing artist in her own right). After a few impressive-but-unfocused records in which they tried to be a Garage Rock band with synthesizers, here’s the record where they finally figured out what they were up to: Black-Wave. Yes, there is such a thing as Synth-Punk, and with this record Lost Sounds could teach even The Screamers a thing or two.
“Blackcoats / White Fear” by Lost Sounds
“I wanted to be a ’60s garage band, when that stuff wasn’t in Spin Magazine.” —Jay Reatard
If you only pick up one album by Lost Sounds, may I recommend Rat’s Brains & Microchips? Every Lost Sounds record is great, of course, but I think they really hit their stride with this one—they’d figured out who they were as a band with Black-Wave, and they proceeded to do what they do better than anyone. And what they do is write complex (by Punk standards, at least) songs with a Synth-Punk bent and an apocalyptic attitude, almost like a cross between two of Jay’s favorite bands, Devo and Emperor. If my description sounds muddled, that’s kind of the point: nobody sounds quite like Lost Sounds.
Addendum: I’ve listened to this song roughly eleventy-billion times before someone told me that “Blackcoats / Whitefear” is supposedly about the Columbine shootings. Huh.
“Rat’s Brains and Microchips” by Lost Sounds
Nothing against dumb three-chord Punk—I happen to love that music—but this track is light-years beyond all that. When he first formed Lost Sounds with Rich Crook and former girlfriend Alicja Trout, Jay Reatard wanted their new band to sound like The Dwarves. It was up to Alicja to put Jay behind the keyboards and encourage his more experimental tendencies. She said in an interview:
One of the things that sparked my ideas was that I was sick of hearing and writing songs that were about the same kind of garage rock subject matter - about girls and guys and your sexual self esteem or something like that. I had a really apocalyptic view of the world and I think Jay does, too. We’re all a little bit mean spirited.
Or as Jay himself added, “You can only stick the microphone so far up your ass until it just gets boring.” They wanted to do something different, and boy did they ever.
I want to play this song so loud it’ll bruise the ears of all those Punk Purists writing their letters to Maximum RocknRoll, yelling “sellout!” at any band who doesn’t sound enough like Cro-Mags circa 1986. Fuck those guys. Punk isn’t about adhering to a rigid form. It’s about breaking free of whatever everyone else is doing.
And another thing: This track is included in the Blac Static retrospective, which is a great place to start if you’re new to Lost Sounds. Personally, it broke my heart a little when I bought this record. “Best Of” records are like a tombstone for a band. When you put out a retrospective, it means the glory days are over.
Doc Shoe Made Another Record Store Haul
Once again, I get a paycheck and I drop a chunk of it on vinyl—the only difference this time being, now that I live in the Midwestern Cultural Void, I had to do my shopping online.
So now then: As you may have noticed from my posts, I’ve been getting more and more interested in Garage Rock, so I’ve decided to stop fucking around and really dive the fuck into it. And I’m finally getting around to exploring the Teanbeat Records catalogue. Throw in a little Synth-Punk with the Lost Sounds and some classic Hardcore courtesy of The Dicks, and I believe I’m ready to stress-test the new speakers I finally got for my turntable.
Oh, and naturally, I’ll be posting the shit out of this music. Along with that Jen-You-Wine Country Music Marathon I promised. So stay tuned, folks, and keep on rockin’ in the Free World—
Doc Shoe
You might remember Alicja Trout from the band Lost Sounds. She was Jay Reatard’s ex-girlfriend and frequent band-mate, which must have worked out better than you’d expect because they were constantly teaming up for projects like Destruction Unit and Nervous Patterns.
She’s prolific as hell. Like the departed Mr. Reatard, Alicja just doesn’t seem to be satisfied unless she’s working with half a dozen bands at any given time, and her current outlet is the River City Tanlines. Here’s the band getting hard and heavy with a song called “He Said Yes,” and Alicja’s wild vocals make me wish dearly there were more women like her in the music world.
Just a little something in advance of the massive Jay Reatard Marathon I’m setting up for next week…
That’s Jay Reatard rocking the synth with Lost Sounds, the band that came to eclipse his work with The Reatards. He continued working with his old band for a few years, of course, but Mr. Reatard wanted to explore other musical possibilities, which led him to branch out from his early Garage Rock sound in favor of inspired synth-driven weirdness. His work with Lost Sounds is like Devo on crank, in the best possible way.
Don’t touch that dial, folks, because next week we’ll be having a Jay Reatard Marathon here at Doc Shoe’s Music Blog. Most of you certainly won’t need me to preach the Gospel of Jimmy Lee Lindsey—he found a wide audience with his final records before he died at the age of 29—but I know that some of you, including my friend and roommate Johnny, are curious about the many other bands Jay Reatard played and recorded with. The dude made something like thirty albums and countless singles with at least a dozen bands in his lifetime, and we’ll be exploring his wild and bewildering back-catalog with posts from Lost Sounds, Nervous Patterns, Final Solutions, Terror Visions, The Reatards, Angry Angles, and Bad Times, not to mention a couple rarities from his solo career.
So stay tuned, folks, and keep on rockin’ in the Free World—
Doc Shoe
This is Lost Sounds, one of the many bands Jay Reatard worked with. I was in a record store just yesterday and picked up a vinyl copy of their “definitive best-of collection,” Blac Static. I’m listening to it now and it’s breaking my heart. Not that there’s anything wrong with the music—I love this band—but because a “best-of” record is like a tombstone for a band. We miss you, Jay.
