Whether they’re playing 15-minute gigs or taking 19 years between albums, the Jesus and Mary Chain have always put a lot of care into the appearance of not giving a fuck. Ever since they first erected their wall of squall on 1985’s Psychocandy, brothers Jim and William Reid have remained permanent residents of a world where sunglasses never come off, cigarette smoke doubles as dry ice, and the only illumination is provided by strobe light. None of the albums they’ve released since has sounded quite the same, but they all invariably feel the same. As the Mary Chain’s first full-length since the late ’90s proves, it will take more than a nearly two-decade recording hiatus to diminish the band’s intrinsic ultraviolet vibe.
Despite the epic lag between releases, Damage and Joy feels very much like a logical extension of its predecessor, 1998’s seeming swan song Munki, because the Reids had been unwittingly leaving a breadcrumb trail between the two records this whole time. Half of its 14 tracks are re-recordings of songs that were previously released in some form—as Jim Reid solo releases or as part of their sister Linda’s Sister Vanilla venture. In the case, of “All Things Pass,” it’s a revved-up revamp of the lone song the Mary Chain have officially released since the Reids buried the hatchet back in 2007 (because, presumably, leaving it for dead on the “Heroes” soundtrack seemed too ignoble a fate). Jim recently told Pitchfork that all those castaway tracks “really should have been Mary Chain songs,” if only the brothers’ notoriously combative relationship hadn’t deep-sixed the band after Munki.
By that time, the Reids had eagerly accepted their destiny as cranky old men. Where Psychocandy used harsh noise to conceal tender feelings, Munki’s streamlined motorik’n’roll laid the middle-aged Mary Chain’s hilariously hateful lyrics bare. (It’s hard to pick a favorite from “Commercial”: “McDonald’s is shit!” or “Children are fools!”) They were always an insolent band, but Munki marked the first time the Reids seemed to be having fun with being assholes. And on Damage and Joy, that regression continues apace, with the Reids acting like 50-going-on-15, giddily riffing on drugs, guns, erections, girls with curls, and “fly”/“high” rhymes you can spot from miles away.
Beyond the blatant nods to the group’s past (“Song for a Secret”—one of two duets with Isobel Campbell—manages to sound like “Sometimes Always” and “Just Like Honey” simultaneously), some of the brothers’ lyrics sound here like they were actually salvaged from an early ’90s scrapbook. The puerile robo-blues romp “Get on Home” finds Jim spending a night with a “blow-up girl,” “some LSD,” and “the MTV”; William’s ridiculous “Simian Split” rehashes a hoary old Kurt Cobain murder conspiracy as if the song was written after watching the El Duce interview in Nick Broomfield’s Kurt and Courtney. And then there’s “Facing Up To the Facts,” on which Jim unleashes a corker that could’ve easily materialized at any point in the Mary Chain’s history: “I hate my brother and he hates me/That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
But it’s easy for the Reids to milk that line for laughs, because Damage and Joy sounds bereft of any conflict or tension. The brothers made the record with producer/bassist Youth (with support from touring drummer Brian Young and Lush bassist Phil King), and it feels more like an intimate recording project than a live band document, mostly splitting the difference between routine electro-Stones rave-ups and strung-out ballads. The Reids score most consistently in the latter category, likely because it forces them to keep their adolescent id in check and deal with more adult emotions. The illicit-affair account “Black and Blues” is gilded gospel Americana dressed up in Velvet-y “ba ba bas” and a winsome guest vocal from Sky Ferreira, who’s thus far batting 1.000 in duets with Scottish rock institutions. And the Spacemen 3-style stoner jangle of “War on Peace” grapples with every aging rebel’s existential crisis—“What if I run?/Where would I run to?”—before issuing a proverbial “fuck it” and stomping on the pedal for an adrenalized, fuzz-powered finale.
But the biggest eye opener is album centerpiece “Los Feliz (Blues and Greens).” This luminous, orchestral acoustic lullaby plays like a misanthropic answer to Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” its idyllic California scenery—topped with a chorus of “God bless America!”—undercut by a deep-seated despair (“In the land of the free/Wishing they were dead”). Where they were once defined by a collision of face-melting feedback and soothing melody, the modern-day Mary Chain are governed by a different set of extremes: the pent-up desire to act like goofy, hormonal teenagers and the sobering knowledge those days are long gone. But as the brothers recruit their sister/mediator Linda for a closing reboot of Sister Vanilla’s “Can’t Stop the Rock,” the song’s cheery rallying cry—“I’m falling, and I’m happy!”—carries the reassurance that now, more than ever, the Jesus and Mary Chain are united in holy acrimony.
