A mere three weeks before his 17-date European tour, Jay Reatard (real name Jay Lindsay) found himself without a band. [Photo credit Rob Walbers.]

His tersely-worded, spelling-grammar-error hilarious Twitter response read: “Band quit ! Fuck them ! They are boring rich kids who can’t play for ahit anyways .. Say hello to your ugly and boring wifes opps I mean lifes guys suck it.”

That was October 6.

I spoke with the prolific punk rocker by phone nearly seven weeks later and a few shows into his current U.S. tour, and he still seemed bitterly bemused. “We never talked about it. There wasn’t any sort of ‘I’m not happy in this situation, can we fix this?’ There was no talk of compromise or facilitating some sort of needs that they had for the road. It was just like, ‘Hey man, we quit, we’re on your porch, can we have our money?’” He laughed unhappily. “But you know, maybe I did do something really wrong and I’m just delusional and I don’t know it.”

The desertion by Billy Hayes and Stephen Pope has been linked to Jay’s concert antics. (the most recent YouTube clip featured Jay peeing on Pope during a jam) [CORRECTION: According to Jay via Twitter, the aforementioned antics did not include this video clip, which was from a Reatards reunion show; the person peed on was from that band and was not, in fact, Pope.] But the two wouldn’t have joined lo-fi garage group Wavves a month later if they couldn’t handle frontman drama, right? Lead singer/visionary Nathan Williams’ track record includes a very public onstage meltdown in Barcelona earlier this year that cost him a drummer and led to the cancellation of Wavves’ European tour.

For Jay, it was important that his overseas dates continued as planned. “I was like, well, I have this European tour — why don’t I just get some Europeans? This band, the Cola Freaks from Denmark, immediately came to mind ‘cause we did about a month of dates in the U.S. last year.” The Cola Freaks weren’t active at the time, and bassist Anders Thode and drummer Jacob Elving quickly agreed to fill the vacancies.

The choice turned out to be a positive one. While rehearsing with the duo in Denmark, Jay gushed about it (and jabbed his former bandmates) on his website: “…With the last band it was all overplaying — turn it up, play it fast — but the songs got lost in all the distortion. This new band makes the songs in a way sound more pure by scaling back and putting more emphasis on the melody and the changes … It sounds exactly the way I wanted these songs to sound like live when I wrote them.” [Jay and new band pictured below.]

The new album, Watch Me Fall, has the fast and scrappy punk rock rhythms you expect, and Jay’s high, snotty, Brit-disaffected vocals. But his lo-fi garage grime has been shined up with sweetened melodies and appealing aural textures — synthesizers, percussive flourishes, multi-tracked vocals — that give the album more of a noise pop feel. Though it may be new to some Jay Reatard listeners, the artist said he’d included lots of instrumentation in his demos for his previous band, synthfied dark punk outfit The Lost Sounds, but after their ugly break-up, he decided to go in the opposite direction and strip everything down. By the time he recorded Watch Me Fall several years later, he’d become comfortable enough in his own sound that he started incorporating and distilling those techniques he’d abandoned.

Jay's musical evolution has proven popular and he's enjoying his time in the indie spotlight playing for a wide range of audiences, from his tour opener in Chicago at the Aragon Ballroom supporting the Pixies, to the next night's headlining gig at a dive bar in Columbus, Ohio. “I toured for a long time and it’d be like, okay, the only people who are coming to my shows are record collectors who think that they have better taste than anyone else in the entire world — and they very well might. But it’s good to see people of all kinds. It’s a bit of a challenge when you get a different crowd that you know aren’t 100 percent on your side, and you might have to win them over. It makes you play harder. You can get lazy if you keep playing to the same 50 people every night.”

Jay’s creative output has been on overdrive since he started making music in 1998 as The Reatards. He performed with Lost Sounds for several years before its dissolution in 2005, and throughout his tenure with that band and in the years since, he self-produced a vast repertoire of music released by various small labels until 2006, when he dropped his first solo album as Jay Reatard, Blood Visions. By 2008, lots of good press and heavy duty touring had snared him an exclusive deal with esteemed NY-based indie label Matador Records. Six 7” singles and a Matador Singles ‘08 compilation followed, and Watch Me Fall, his first proper studio album with Matador, dropped this past August.

“It was never like, you shouldn’t do this or you shouldn’t do that,” he said of his working relatioship with Matador. He explained that in the past, he’d always made the record, then shopped it around later. “You have a finished idea that you’re able to say, ‘Take it or leave it, this is what this is, it’s finished.’ This is the first full-length I’ve made where the label solicited me to create a record specifically for the label.”

The album has a sugarcoated feel instrumentally, but the subject matter is as dark as its inspiration. “I happened to watch The Shining one night while I was on a bit of controlled substances, and it really started resonating in my head, this whole idea of a guy who’s trying to work on something and he doesn’t really know what it is and he’s kind of possessed and everybody is just bothering the hell out of him and he can’t get anything done and he wants to kill them. So I just kind of ran with that. There’s songs about freezing to death and, you know, killing your family. All those fun things.”

Watch Me Fall also seems influenced by the style of Chris Knox. Jay discovered the New Zealand DIY-er noise pop pioneer about three years ago and was immediately hooked. Knox’s music “sounded really cheery but he might write a song about a guy obsessed with porno mags and he locks himself in his room his entire life and then a beautiful woman comes along and he’s afraid of her ... He always kind of writes about darker things but they’re like these awesome pop songs that you don’t even concentrate on the negative lyrics because it always feels kind of fun.” Jay got to know Knox when he played New Zealand last and the two discussed working together on a single. But Knox suffered from a life-altering stroke in June and the collaboration never happened.

When Jay was contacted about recording a track for a Knox benefit album, he jumped at the chance. “I was in Denmark and I sat on a toilet, a Danish toilet with my computer, and recorded a song in the bathroom, and emailed it off.”

His toilet bowl rendition of “Pull Back The Shades” by Knox’s first band, The Enemy, is the opening track on STROKE — Songs For Chris Knox, a double album tribute to Knox that raises funds for his rehabilitation costs. Along with Reatard, a first-rate roster of international participants who Knox has played with, befriended and influenced over the years donated their time to record his songs, among them, Yo La Tengo, Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel), Lambchop, Will Oldham (aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy), A.C. Newman and Guided By Voices. The album dropped in New Zealand last month and sees its American release in February via Merge Records.

Jay Reatard

w/The Semis/Easybreezy, Sat., Dec. 5, 9 p.m., Crowbar, Ybor City, $10 in advance/$12 dos (ages 18 and up)

Here's Jay Reatard's video for the first single off Watch Me Fall, "It Ain't Gonna Save Me." A child's birthday party turns into a revolution against adults. Very fun stuff.