The Jesus and Mary Chain

Andrew Ross, contributor and host of Spin This! 

 

Psychocandy turns forty and hasn’t mellowed a bit. Honestly, as a whole and on its surface, it's not an easy listen. The feedback still sounds like someone dragging a microphone across a live wire, but the melodies still arrive fully formed, as if the Reid brothers wrote them in 1964 and simply waited twenty years for the technology to catch up with their contempt.

 

Fourteen tracks, thirty-eight minutes, no fat. One idea executed perfectly: bury perfect 60s pop melodies under a blizzard of feedback and distortion. The Jesus and Mary Chain took the Shangri-Las and the Velvet Underground as co-equal parents and produced something that still sounds like nothing else. “Just Like Honey” opens with that half-speed drumbeat and a haze of guitar that feels like walking into a dream you’re not sure you want. “Never Understand” follows and detonates. From there the album rarely pauses for breath: “The Living End,” “Taste the Floor,” “In a Hole,” each one a perfect three-minute collision of girl-group sweetness and pure sonic sabotage. Even the quieter moments (“Cut Dead,” “Sowing Seeds”) carry the same low-level threat.

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Jim Reid's half-whispered vocals float in a storm of white noise. The drums (mostly Bobby Gillespie standing in) are deliberately primitive. Every guitar line is designed to hurt. Yet the songs themselves are airtight: verse-chorus-verse, major chords, heartbreaking hooks you can hum after one listen.

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It invented shoegaze before the term existed. Everything that followed, My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive, and even current artists like Glasvegas pay tribute to where melody meets mayhem.

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Four decades later it hasn't dated and hasn't been surpassed. For me however, 1987's Darklands will always be tops because it's the album where the smoke clears from the noise assaults of this one, but Psychocandy stands as truly one of the handful of genuinely revolutionary rock albums.