The Jesus and Mary Chain (henceforth “JAMC”) was the musical project of Jim and William Reid, who were (a) Scottish, (b) brothers, and (c) the foremost technological and scientific innovators of the modern rock era. Before they came along, many people still assumed that in order to make aggressive, energetic noises, the members of rock bands had to actually move around, do guitar windmills, and look engaged. The JAMC did not like this situation, because those poses tended to be either uncool or boring, and often made one look like a complete twat.
But after a brief scientific study of their equipment, it came to the JAMC’s attention that electric guitars, when paired with high amplifier volume and harmonic distortion, could create feedback, thereby producing aggressive noises mostly on their own, and freeing their actual players to stand around looking half dead, depressed, and generally too contemptuous and disgusted to really bother playing-- all of which seemed, in 1985 and in the particular case of the JAMC, totally super-awesome.
Obviously the drummer for such a group couldn’t sit behind a big kit looking like he knew what he was doing, so the JAMC stood Bobby Gillespie (yes, that one) up behind only two drums-- a floor tom and a snare-- and had him bash away like he was pissed off at them but either too bored or too drunk to finish them off. A similar approach was taken to bass guitar and vocals.
If the band had applied these tactics to knotty, difficult music, you would never have heard of them, and Dominique Leone would be reviewing these reissues. Luckily-- intuitively-- the JAMC wrote pop songs, basic three-chord rock’n’roll and all-hook melodies, vaguely in the style of early Beach Boys, girl groups, or the laid-back end of the Rolling Stones. Only...as played by lazy, spiteful, nearly hopeless people who didn’t care one way or the other and therefore covered the whole thing in screeching. (See also: the Velvet Underground.)
And thus we get Psychocandy (1985), the JAMC’s enduring contribution to the annals of rock history.
Sometimes people tell you that a 20-year-old album “sounded like nothing else,” but when you listen with today’s ears, it seems rather quaint and unsurprising. Psychocandy is not one of those albums. Its noise isn’t the thick, tactile noise of the new millennium: It’s thin, trebly, and drowned in indistinct reverb, such that this record still sounds like it’s being played in the apartment across the street at staggering volume while someone intermittently runs glass through a table saw. The music stumbles its way from stoned, lazy beauty (“Just Like Honey”) to speed-freak noise (“Never Understand”) to almost-bouncy pop (“Taste of Cindy”). Jim Reid chants his melodies in the selfish, mostly monosyllabic vocabulary of rock’n’roll (“I’m in love with myself,” “I don’t want you to need me,” “oh yeah,”). And just about every song comes out ideal: You’d think they’d sound like jerks, or toughs, and yet it all comes off so vulnerable, so pretty.
The UK loved it, and it’s worth asking why. One reason, I think, is that people in the stylish 80s were thrilled to see their own personal resurrection of the same rock’n’roll “cool” myth that runs through fellow heroin enthusiasts like the Stones, the Pistols, and Nirvana-- which is to say, a band that doesn’t seem to give a fuck about much, including pleasing its own audience, and thus lets that audience live out its own (sensibly unfulfilled) fantasies of alienated non-fuck-giving and antisocial moping. Psychocandy remains a perfect record for states of feeling so bratty, depressed, or disgusted that you actually start to enjoy it. Also, like with most heroin rock’n’roll bands, there’s an earnest, romantic belief in something beautiful and unattainable in the midst of it, which might be drug-related for them but doesn’t have to be for you. The many fun and pretty songs here still seem tired and hard-won, like the band’s grasping at beauty rather than just claiming it exists.
The JAMC also sent a couple massively influential messages to everyone else. One was that-- as mentioned-- you could make big noises without being or acting big. The other was a reminder that the ethos of a band could be wrapped up not in the notes or the songs they played, but in the actual sound of their records; that stuff could be content, not style. These lessons, put together, account for a good 75% of the shoegazer scene that followed.
With all of that accomplished, the JAMC’s next four albums were spent figuring out what in the world to do next. Decisions were made as follows:**
Darklands (1987): With Gillespie gone and replaced by an unobtrusive drum machine, the band turns down the noise attitude and works on developing the back-to-basics pop songs that were always underneath. The singles (“Happy When it Rains”) are a joy, big hooks laced with just the right amount of vintage leather-and-shades cool.
Automatic (1989): Conventional wisdom wrongly calls this the dud. With the band reduced to the brothers only, things go artificial: The drum machine is foregrounded, the bass is played on keyboards, the feedback’s on vacation. In that space, the Reids take their biggest shot at doing full-on pop, something that-- on a global alternative classic like the Pixies-covered “Head On”-- feels like a career peak. The rockier album cuts get pretty turgid, and both Reids start to feel like parodies of themselves, but at points they fall into a synthetic rock grind that’s almost industrial-- fascinating, in a time-capsule kind of way.
Honey’s Dead (1992): Conventional wisdom wrongly calls this the return to form, mostly because they got a drummer and wrote some lively tunes. The problem is that the well-recorded feedback and effortful Jagger yowling here sound like two guys straining to be cool, the exact thing that Psychocandy evaded. It’s also their first fully contemporary grunge-era record, so if you wanted to hear a rock band try, you could just buy something current.
Stoned and Dethroned (1994): Back to the beauty thing-- the band breaks out a few acoustic guitars and settles gracefully into a bunch of drawling Stones-type numbers. How convenient that William was dating Hope Sandoval, of popular acoustic drawlers Mazzy Star: Her duet with Jim on "Sometimes Always" really is a standout.
And these five discs offer those five records, each remastered, and each with a DVD face on the flipside containing all relevant music videos and a hi-res album version.
There is only one warning that must go with them: Do not try this at home. Since the turn of the millennium, a staggering number of rock bands have put a staggering amount of effort into seeming like they don’t care. Some have studied the poses and sounds like engineers; others have reduced themselves to the point of intolerable blandness, all because actually trying something might leave them open to embarrassment, open to criticism. Don’t try this at home: These days we could use more of the opposite end of the 80s, the unembarrassed striving and the unselfconscious quirk.
