Angry Angles captured Jay Reatard at a pivotal point in his career—which, up to that point, hadn’t resembled a career at all. On paper, the short-lived band was just the latest in an erratic string of projects that the Memphis-based garage-punk wild man had been tearing through since the late ’90s, chief among them the Reatards and the Lost Sounds. During that time, he always kept a handful of side projects on the back burner, but Angry Angles seemed different. When formed in 2005, immediately after the breakup of the Lost Sounds, Angry Angles seemed poised to become Reatard’s new big thing, the group that might propel him to the next level of cult infamy. Instead, the band imploded in 2006, leaving a trail of singles in its wake.
*Angry Angles *collects those singles, along with previously unreleased bonus material, and as such it comprises the entire studio output of Angry Angles. Seventeen songs nailed to the wall in a little over a year is nothing to sneeze at—and neither are the songs themselves, despite spackling the slim gap between the Lost Sounds and Reatard’s storied solo career, launched in ’06 and cut short by his death in 2010. With bassist/singer Alix Brown (cofounder with Reatard of the indie label Shattered Records) and alternating drummers Paul Artigues and Ryan Rousseau (the latter a Reatards alum) in tow, Reatard synthesized everything he’d done up to that point. Borrowing some of the Lost Sounds’ retro-new-wave roboticism, but rendered in a more vivid, visceral Reatards-esque spew, Angry Angles tracks like “Crowds” and “Apparent-Transparent” are lobotomized post-punk, whiplash anthems for 21st-century dehumanization.
“Apparent-Transparent” also features one of Brown’s most striking vocal performances, a voice-processed call-and-response with Reatard that pays unabashed homage to Devo. There’s an actual Devo cover on Angry Angles as well, a beautifully bruised rendition by Brown of “Blockhead,” along with reverential versions of classics by Wire (“The 15th”), the Urinals (“Black Hole”), and Reatard’s mentor Greg Oblivian (“Memphis Creep” by the Oblivians). Churned together, these four bands pretty much comprise Reatard’s chemical makeup—not that he was ever shy about his influences, or his hooks. There are some great ones on these songs: the scabbed pop-punk of “Stab You Dead” for one, or “Can’t Do It Anymore,” which mixes feral riffage with a singsong chorus designed to stick in the head like a pickaxe.
Two versions of “Things Are Moving” are included here, but they’re anything but redundant. On the original single version, distortion is smeared across Reatard’s manic chants and punch-drunk guitar; on the abridged alternate version, that noise is whittled to a finer point. “Things are moving around me all the time,” Reatard howls on both. It sums up exactly where he was circa-Angry Angles. His romantic relationship with Brown ended the same time the band did, leaving him to pour his scattershot energy into his burgeoning solo career. Brown moved on to Golden Triangle, then a DJ career; Rousseau moved back to his home state of Arizona to revive the formidable Destruction Unit (an outfit Reatard was originally a part of). And Reatard funneled his turmoil into his 2006 breakthrough solo album, Blood Visions, an album that sounds more and more like a masterpiece as time goes by. Angry Angles* *is a blurry, inconsistent snapshot of his liminal state between dude-in-a-million-bands and burgeoning solo icon—ragged here, refined there, and brimming with vitality.
