Destruction Unit - Unauthorized Destruction Unit

Hard to believe, literally. And yet it's true. Just when the sudden, painful passing of Jay Reatard seemed to have buried Destruction Unit and the other projects involving the talented Memphis musician for good, an unexpected rebirth occurred, surprising both in its timing and in the way it unfolded, as much as in its final result.

Listening to the last two albums credited to Ryan "Elvis" Wong, you feel a deep sense of estrangement, like becoming aware of an alien, metallic-shaped body lurking in your own guts. Although they went almost completely unnoticed, even among niche audiences, Eclipse and the most recent Sonoran, besides foreshadowing a turning point, are yet another demonstration of the eclecticism of musicians from the 2000s. Being able to move beyond one's own vocational attitudes, clearly spurred on by a media system that makes any cultural frame available to anyone, has become almost a watchword for any self-respecting musician. But let's take it in order. Formed between Memphis and Phoenix at the start of the last decade, Destruction Unit initially revolved around Ryan "Elvis" Wong, aka Ryan Rousseau, on drums, vocals and keyboards, later joined by Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr./Jay Reatard, who handled guitar, bass and vocals, and Alicja Trout, on guitar, vocals and keyboards. Around these three figures the entire garage rock scene of Memphis, and partly of Phoenix, ended up revolving, populated by bands like Lost Sounds, Bad Times, Final Solutions, Black Sunday, Tokyo Electron, Sexual Slurs, MouseRocket and various others.

Well, these bands shared a deviant take on garage rock, as if to say: "let's irradiate with nuclear radiation a body already devastated by tumor metastases and see what happens." It's not hard to guess how that would turn out. Built on the use of noise elements and buzzing synths - practically every Memphis garage rocker kept a crumpled holy card of Tomata Du Plenty in their wallet, and a slightly less worn one of Suicide - this approach was in many ways ahead of its time in anticipating weird garage/shitgaze, so much so that Lost Sounds and Destruction Unit are known and revered by many "shitgazers" and strung-out garage kids of the latest generation.

But who was Ryan "Elvis" Wong? A guy like many others, really, one who grew up between Memphis and Arizona (try to guess where that nickname comes from), who, between reckless skateboarding sessions and listening to his favorite bands, put together his first garage outfits as a teenager, trying to imitate his idols. From then on it was an escalation of frantic involvements and projects. He backed Shawn Foree in Digital Leather, where he played drums, indulging his passion for synth-punk. Digital Leather are an interesting band, purveyors of a dark sound that's more than devastated, with robotic rhythms and inhuman melodies, so much so that Goner Records, the label that released one of their best albums (Sorcerer), described them as dark synth-pop - essentially a sort of Philip K. Dick set to (acidic) notes. And that's not all: Rousseau is best known as the drummer for Reatards, while the most die-hard garage punk fans will likely have followed his exploits in Wongs and the obscure Tokyo Electron.

His latest venture is the project Earthmen and Strangers, with Luis Padilla (guitar), Joe Mathis (bass), and Lenny DeLeon (drums). "These guys introduced me to Black Flag and Circle Jerks," Rousseau said in an interview; the fact is that Earthmen and Strangers play a breezy garage pop with a faint shoegaze aftertaste.

Rosseau moved from Yuma to Memphis in 1997. He did it along with his parents, he says, because in Yuma he had no job and was always drunk. Before moving, he got Jay Reatard's number from Jack Yarber of the Oblivians, but decided not to call him. Once he got to Memphis, he put up a flyer at Shangri La Records saying he was looking for musicians to start a band in the vein of the Pagans. As it happened, two guys called him, one of whom was none other than Jay Reatard. Thus the Reatards were born, a band Rosseau still remembers with great fondness, repeatedly describing it as a major formative experience for him. Formative indeed, because once each member of the band started listening to music other than the strung-out garage rock they'd been feeding on, the need arose to set up other projects.

No sooner said than done: Destruction Unit officially came into being in 2000. Jay Reatard was busy with the Lost Sounds, so Rosseau asked his brother for help, who played keyboards on the first seven-inch (My Desease). Then, working alone, he wrote the songs for the first LP, and after hearing them Jay and Alicja Trout decided to join the new project, forming the original core of the band. With Jay Reatard in the lineup, Destruction Unit were, on a par with Hunches and Hospitals, the fiercest, most uncompromising garage rock combo of the 2000s. Their music was a bladed assault built equally on raw but never werewolf-like vocals (the blues component was totally absent), possessed rhythms, and sandpaper-coarse floods of feedback further thickened by hallucinatory synth pummeling. Pure adrenaline, more than that: sandpaper rubbed on a newborn's backside. Rosseau hated writing lyrics, which were thrown together haphazardly, while he loved focusing on the sonic side of things and on recording quality. The aggressive sound of the first two LPs was, Rosseau himself says, a vehicle for venting his anger at the stupid things of this world. Well, rhetorical intent aside, Self Destruction Of A Man — released in 2004 on Empty — sounds like a blow to the back of the head dealt with an innocent length of pipe. Destruction Unit excel at developing a sound that, for all its iconoclastic fury, draws its strength from being a point of balance between classic garage sound, hardcore and synth-punk. The result is extremely taut, violent, raw songs, which nonetheless possess a not-so-hidden melodic poise. A prime example is "Let's Lie", a rubber bullet fired at supersonic speed beyond the threshold of audibility. For anyone wanting to put a gun to their own head, the album provides ammunition galore: "Race/Time", "So Shattered" and above all "Cancer" follow the same blueprint of maximum aggression paired with solid melodic structure.

It's all very engaging and smooth-flowing, until you reach the nearly six minutes of the closing title track, a piece so morbid and different from the rest that it leaves you utterly stunned. Yes indeed, because "Self Destruction Of A Man" is a Nine Inch Nails-style elegy (think "Hurt") defaced by noise storms and harmonic decapitations à la Throbbing Gristle: practically incestuous. Practically a masterpiece of deviance. Though some hint of the anomaly brewing had already surfaced with the equally degenerate "I'm A Mutant", three minutes of disjointed screaming drowned in a magma of disturbed frequencies — the kind of track that makes you want to bash your head against the wall until it bleeds. While good overall, the following Death To The Old Flesh is a less inspired rehash of Self Destruction Of A Man. So: the usual anthemic rawness ("Meet The Sadist", "I Dare You"), synthetic suggestions à la Screamers ("Day Of You Death") and incurable radioactive-contamination pathologies ("A Unit", "On The Screens"). It's worth noting how, on these latter tracks, Destruction Unit resemble some of the bands on the Hungry Eye Records roster — above all the late, lamented Weegs — who around the same years were turning upside down the dark-rock dance halls of the most derelict American backwaters.

Unlike so many rock stars, starlets and die-hard deviants who summon death upon themselves, on the morning of January 13, 2010 it was death that came to Jay Reatard. It arrived without warning and took him away in his sleep. The cause? After an initial theory that even speculated homicide, the autopsy revealed the death was due to a lethal mix of alcohol and drugs. Stop, end of story — at least for Jay. Evidently not for Ryan Rousseau, who had no intention of shelving the Destruction Unit experience. He did, however, change its character, to the surprise of fans and of anyone who had followed the band's discography up to that point. In the current lineup, Ryan Rosseau is joined by Rusty Rosseau on bass, Nick Napp on guitars and Justin Keefer on drums. Psychedelia is the new watchword, a heavy psychedelia bordering on heavy sound, so much so that on the band's official MySpace page the only influence listed is kraut-rock. Let's be honest, this latest incarnation of Destruction Unit sounds less exciting than the original one, yet the guys operate with real craft. The result is music that's pleasant in its psychedelic haze, and for that reason worth paying attention to. 2010's Eclipse and Sonoran wouldn't look out of place, for instance, in the Tee Pee catalogue, and they also betray not-too-hidden similarities with Plastic Crimewave Sound. Despite a clear turn toward the most far-out psychedelic territory, the two albums are nonetheless quite different, and it's hard to say whether Sonoran was the natural destination of the turn taken with Eclipse, or whether Rosseau had some other acid-tinged trick up his sleeve.

Having dropped the synth barrages in favor of subliminally psychedelic analog electronics, Eclipse comes across as a work fully in line with the tradition running from Silver Apples to Spacemen 3. The opening "Time Traveler" is, in this sense, more proof than mere hint, backed up by the spacey ablutions of "Princess" and "Yuman Dance". Overall, the album flows along carrying obsessive atmospheres, even in its seemingly more diluted moments ("Depression"). Sure, it lacks a true centerpiece, lacks any standout moments, yet every song manages to give off an aura of unhealthy allure. Things change with the latest album, Sonoran, whose tracks stay true to the psychedelic turn of the previous record but push its heaviness to extremes, wrapped as they are in an almost suffocating, doom-like atmosphere. The eleven minutes of murky, magmatic hard-psych trance in Guru Guru style that make up "Desert Snow" represent the center of gravity of the whole album. The rest of the tracks play out on a noisy minimalism, part Plastic Crimewave Sound, part Monoshock. Asked about the album, Rosseau states that Sonoran is the sound to listen to while walking through the desert of the same name under a full moon shining in the sky. Maybe so; the fact remains that, aside from a few pastoral, mystically tinged moments ("Ceveman", "Listen"), the rest pulses at fairly high frequencies — the motorik-beat propulsion of "Moonson", the Hawkwind-style neurotic closer "Death Tunnel" — as if to prove that Destruction Unit have nothing to envy in Comets On Fire or Residual Echoes. Is this, then, the road Rosseau has definitively chosen to follow? Who knows. That said, long live the Unit of Destruction, whatever it does next.

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