I was discussing this album with a friend of mine who is reviewing and playing it for the Listening Post which is this live review / music / board games night thing that we do at The Watusi on the last Thursday of every month and it’s real fun so you should come…haha…anyway. Gemma noted that for the first few listens it is super intense to an almost-too-much level and it’s actually quite disconcerting and obnoxious. BUT, if you can push through this close-to-pain threshold and listen a bit more and couple it with his equally abrasive musical history you kind of start to ‘get it’ and it’s actually Really. Good. It’s like how people say sarcasm is the lowest form of humour but it actually takes a really quick witted, naturally intelligent, good conversationalist to hit the nail of sarcasm on the head at the right moment. Jay Reatard is the sarcasm of music.
Having dropped out of school at eighth grade to learn every instrument under the sun, produce everything himself and play with everyone he wants and potentially even didn’t want to until he’s released hundreds of albums and EPs and 7”s the last of which featured a cover of him sitting on the toilet – how self-referential is this – he now releases an album called ‘Watch me Fall’ which is really a dichotomy because of course with this experience under his belt he’s hardly going to release a terrible record: but maybe the first time cringe listen and the album title are his cruel joke on us, or people who don’t give his ‘sarcasm’ a chance to mature.
Notable tracks are ‘Man of Steel’ with their building choruses and shouty double vocal verse, which incredibly quick, high hat scattered drumming, which then turns into a subtle different time signature as Reatard slams these awesome guitar notes on top of it and then adds some feedback for a really quite fully awesome instrumental breakdown in a, ahem, two-and-a-half-minute track. And the structure of every track is different too. Like the schizophrenia he displays live, ‘Watch the Fall’, while retaining that grimy tightness that Reatard has almost imprinted as his own, the tracks are completely about-face with the way in which they combine verse chorus and classic guitar and drum sequences to create really quite alternate tracks. BAM (this is what you’re head will feel like after the first listen) and BAM (this is you punching the ear after listening to it whilst partying).
