Jay Lindsey, better known as Jay Reatard, rehearses in the living room of his Midtown home in 2009. Six years after his death, Reatard's work with the Angry Angles will focus on a new Goner Records compilation due out in late-Spring.

SHARE Angry Angles: Jay Reatard and Alix Brown in 2005. (Michael Donahue/The Commercial Appeal)

By Bob Mehr of The Commercial Appeal

Today marks six years since the passing of punk-rock polymath Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr., better known as Jay Reatard. The creative force behind the Reatards, Lost Sounds, Final Solutions and Angry Angles, Lindsey's career as a solo artist was in the ascendancy during the final years of his life. He'd released the widely hailed 2006 classic "Blood Visions" for In the Red and an acclaimed 2009 follow-up "Watch Me Fall," for Matador Records when he died of cocaine toxicity at his Cooper-Young home on Jan. 13, 2010.

In the more than half decade since his death, Lindsey has been the subject of numerous articles, a feature-length film documentary and various archival releases of his music. Much of the reissue work has been carried out by two of Lindsay's friends, mentors and label benefactors, Goner Records co-owners Zac Ives and Eric Friedl.

Over the past few years, the local label has reissued the first two records by Lindsey's teenage band the Reatards — "Teenage Hate" as a double album with some early cassette-only material as a bonus in 2011; and a "Grown Up, F***** Up" package in 2015. In between, Goner released a compilation of unissued recordings from Lost Sounds, Lindsey's synth-punk band with Alicja Trout.

This spring, Goner will release a still-untitled 17-track compilation focusing on Lindsey's work with Angry Angles, his band with onetime girlfriend Alix Brown. The combo, which ran between 2005 and 2006, was an important marker in Lindsey's creative evolution as it immediately preceded the breakthrough of "Blood Visions."

"A lot of the songs on 'Blood Visions' started out as Angry Angles songs — they were doing most of that stuff live," says Ives. "The relationship [between Lindsey and Brown] ended, and so those songs wound up being a solo project rather an Angry Angles album."

"To me, the Angry Angles is the last big piece of the puzzle of Jay's music — and it's really one of my favorite periods, maybe my favorite of his. It's an amazing point in his maturation," says Ives. "I mean, that's a weird word to put with Jay. But his work with the [Angles] represents the moment right before he became really well-known."

Immediately after Lindsey's passing in 2010, Ives and Friedl, in consultation with his family and manager Adam Shore, decided it was crucial to document his recorded work. They recovered from his home a self-contained digital rig Lindsey used to record and a batch of CD-Rs. "He had a bunch of stuff at his house, and [his family and management] wanted to make sure that stuff didn't just kind of disappear," says Ives. "We got the hard drive and recording gear and a big stack of CDs. We tried to go through all of that and make sure it was cataloged."

For Ives and Friedl, who were both close with Lindsey since he first turned up on the local scene as a feral punk-rock preteen in the early '90s, the process was difficult. "At one point it was just grief," says Ives. "It was sad to listen to that stuff. Now it's not — now it feels like music that needs to be out there and that people need to hear. But it took a little bit of time to get to that point."

Although the Angry Angles put out a handful of singles and split 7-inches, most of their output came in fairly limited runs or on Europe-only releases. Those singles, as well as recovered Angles recordings that surfaced among Lindsey's archive, and a newly discovered one-off session done by the band in Toronto — which featured Lindsey, Brown and Destruction Unit's Ryan Rousseau playing drums — represent the mix of material on the forthcoming Goner compilation, which the label expects to release in late-April or early-May.

In general, the material showcases another side of Lindsey, who generally functioned as a one-man band in the studio, writing, playing and singing everything. "With the Angles, because he was playing with Alix, he was tethered to something else — it wasn't just all in his head or a pure recording project," says Ives. "It was something where he had to work off of someone. And they were great together."

Though the possibility of future live releases remains, Ives feels that the Angles compilation will be the last major addition to Lindsey's recorded legacy — and a project that finds him fascinatingly perched between his underground roots and the more mainstream success he ultimately found.

"The weird thing is a lot of people found out about Jay at the tail end of his life. He had a big impact on a wide group of people during the last two or three years of his life — but he had huge impact on garage music, punk music for the 10 years before that. That impact is every bit as important as what he did when he got on the bigger stage."

"For me, the Angry Angles is the bridge between those two things, those two worlds. It's where he linked up the more raw side of his music with where he figured out how to write pop songs, or songs with more of a hook. It's a really crucial part of his musical lineage. It's taken a while and been a big project for us to put together. But when we get it out there, I believe it's going to be a special thing."