Description
Jay Reatard’s visibility outside of the garage punk underground was steadily on the rise in the last years of his life, having signed with Matador Records in 2008 and issued a handful of singles before his album Watch Me Fall arrived less than six months before his death in January 2010. As a consequence, many new fans were still catching up with Reatard’s many previous projects, recorded for a variety of small labels, when he passed, and for those still investigating his earlier works, Blac Static is a fascinating collection that gathers the high points of his years with one of his most interesting bands, Lost Sounds. Lost Sounds at once sounds like the missing link between these two styles and something unique in his repertoire. Lost Sounds was one of Reatard’s few projects that sounds like a genuine collaboration, with Alicja Trout trading off with Reatard on lead vocals while playing guitars and keyboards beside him. Blac Static’s fusion of rage and musical smarts is evidence that the excellence of Reatard’s later solo work didn’t come out of nowhere, and suggests that Lost Sounds were maturing into something quite remarkable before they broke up in 2005; what they left behind deserves a careful listen.
