Reissue of the 2002 LP by Jay Reatard affiliated synth punk band. Fully remastered LP including an unreleased instrumental track.Our take: A few years ago FDH reissued Lost Sounds’s Black Wave album, and now they’ve done the same for Rats Brains and Microchips, my favorite Lost Sounds album. In case you’re unfamiliar, Lost Sounds featured Jay Reatard and Alicjia Trout from River City Tanlines. While those are reasons enough for the band to warrant your interest, they also had a schtick; they described themselves as “black wave,” which I took to mean they were combining new wave and black metal (I remember reading interviews with them where they talked about how they were into the 90s Norwegian black metal scene). One reason I always liked Rats Brains is because they lean into the concept harder on this record, and it sounds to me like they were self-consciously trying to incorporate influences from Norwegian black metal into their music. This was years before GG King seamlessly blended garage-punk and gloomy black metal, and the seams show more here. The songs that incorporate those elements sound choppy; the title track is a real odyssey that moves between several very different sections. This isn’t a complaint, by the way; those songs (the title track, “Tronic Graveyard,” “Dreaming of Bleeding”) are my favorites. They just sound fucking weird, and that’s accentuated by the grainy, abrasive production. The more straightforward, punkier songs are excellent too. This is Jay Reatard we’re talking about it here, and even though he was a few years from Blood Visions (one of the indisputably classic punk records of this millennium), the guy still had a knack for writing great hooks and songs. While FDH’s version is just a straight repress without the contextual information that accompanies many reissues these days, it adds an unreleased (instrumental) track.
