Former Memphian Ryan Rousseau returns to the Bluff City tonight as his band Destruction Unit get set to play the Buccaneer Lounge. No stranger to the local punk scene, Rousseau was a founding member of the Reatards and one of the only musicians to perform every year of Goner Fest since its inception in 2004.
The Memphis connections don’t stop there. The original lineup of Destruction Unit also included Memphis musicians Jay Reatard and Alicja Trout (Lost Sounds, Black Sunday). That pair also recorded the first two Destruction Unit albums and eventually helped write a few songs that appear on the second album.
After moving back to Arizona, the band went stagnant for a while, with Rousseau focusing on his more psychedelic outfits Desert Children and Earthmen & Strangers. But in 2009, Rousseau recruited fellow desert punks from various groups to round out the second era of Destruction Unit, this time incorporating elements of krautrock into the distortion-laden mix.
