Jesus And Mary Chain - The Sweet Din

Poised between pop and punk, yet gifted with a peculiar psychedelic streak, Scotland's Jesus And Mary Chain were among the key protagonists of the Eighties. Their insights updated the lesson of Velvet Underground and Stooges for the punk era, adding a touch of dark desolation and a special taste for melody. With them, the foundations were laid for the "shoegazer" movement, which would go on to include bands like My Bloody Valentine, Spacemen 3, Loop, Ride, Spiritualized, Catherine Wheel. What united them was the constant, deafening use of guitar feedback and dissonance, as well as an innate ability to spin pop styles and ambient experiments together in the same centrifuge. "Shoegazer" (literally, "who gazes at his shoes") is also a metaphor describing a musical philosophy centred on solitary introspection confined to one's own micro-universe, on the primacy of aesthetics over ethics, and on the total disappearance from lyrics of any ethical, political or social message.

Jesus And Mary Chain were formed in Glasgow in 1984 by brothers Jim and William Reid (the former on vocals, the latter on guitar), with the addition of bassist Douglas Hart, and in just six months they released a handful of singles, all put out by Alan McGee's Creation label: "Upside Down", "Never Understand", "You Trip Me Up", "Just Like Honey". These are extremely short tracks, built around a slender melodic cartilage and simple chords, submerged in a dense layer of feedback, distortion and reverb. A neurotic, lysergic pop sound that also defines their debut album Psychocandy. It's their masterpiece: a sequence of bare-bones three-minute, three-chord songs, buoyed however by a spectral atmosphere and punk fervour.

Skilled musical recyclers, Jesus And Mary Chain blend the chaotic bacchanals of Velvet Underground with the funereal atmospheres of Joy Division, the searing riffs of Sex Pistols and the neurasthenic electronics of Suicide, the arcane litanies of Nico and the psychodramas of Doors, giving rise to dark, evocative songs. The masterpiece within the masterpiece is "Just Like Honey", destined to become one of the great dark-wave anthems of the decade. After a Phil Spector-style bass-drum intro, underpinned by a dark, gloom-laden bassline, the track is violently torn open by clattering guitar blasts, while Jim Reid's ghostly voice slowly pushes its way through, intoning a deeply tender melody. Rarely in the history of rock has noise, usually a synonym for cacophony, come so close to the concept of "euphony". But the album's other gems include "You Trip Me Up", poised between catharsis and destruction with a listless, irritating vocal; the blazing rockabilly of "Livin' End", "Never Understand" and "In A Hole", bordering on industrial cacophony; and then the gothic ceremony of "Taste The Floor", torn apart by jagged guitar blasts and left floating over bass voids, as well as the twisted chorus of "My Little Underground", thick with dark moods ready to explode. Tension is wound to breaking point by "Sowing Seeds", which almost seems like a forerunner to Nick Cave's "Mercy Seat". The result is a fascinating blend of surrealist psychedelia and punk nihilism. Thus, almost by accident, Reid and co. crowned a historic revolution in British rock: the final, definitive fusion of noise and melody, of feedback and choruses. A sonic template that would pave the way for countless records to come, on both sides of the Channel and beyond.

While Jim Reid flaunts all his conceit by calling Psychocandy "the best album made in the last twenty years", Jesus And Mary Chain cement their status as a cult band of the alternative scene, helped along by brief but extremely intense live shows, often performed under the influence of alcohol and drugs. The Scottish "shoegazers" even play New York's legendary CBGB's, the historic temple of new wave (Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, Talking Heads and many others). Their notoriety is also fed by episodes like brawls in WEA's offices and pressing-plant staff refusing to manufacture the band's records, deemed blasphemous.

The fury of their early days mellows, however, on Darklands, an album that retreats toward a softer pop, between melancholy ballads (the title track, "Fall", "Down On Me"), anguished litanies ("Nine Million Rainy Days") and atmospheric dance (the propulsive "Happy When It Rains"). It's an album that still holds, here and there, interesting ideas, managing above all to preserve that air of desolation and unease that had pervaded Psychocandy.

The follow-up, Automatic (1989), leans further into danceable grooves ("Between Planets", "Head On") and decadent, Lou Reed-style settings ("Here Comes Alice", "Half Way To Crazy"), while still allowing a few forays into hardcore ("Uv Ray", "Gimme Hell") and the wildest blues ("Blues From A Gun"). But too many tracks feel like mere distant echoes of the "noise-pop" that had made the band's fortune.

The decline continues with 1992's Honey's Dead, dominated by repetitive, bland pop, redeemed only in part by the glam-rock of "Reverence", the ballad "Teenage Lust" and the fierceness of "Far Gone And Out". Not even the follow-up, Stoned & Dethroned (1994), manages to reverse the course of a band that by now seems like a faded copy of itself. Only a few scattered signs of life emerge, like the single "Hate Rock And Roll". But the Jesus And Mary Chain story seems to have reached its end. After years of silence, however, Munki (1998) unexpectedly appears, drawing on the raw sound of their early records, with sharp tracks like "Cracking Up", "Virtually Unreal" and "Man On The Moon", but also lingering on more "noir" moods with the solemn ballad "Never Understood". It's their swan song: after the album's release, the Reid brothers bring the band's story to a close, announcing its breakup.

Jesus And Mary Chain's noisy, melancholy pop influenced a host of British bands (from My Bloody Valentine to Primal Scream), but it also resonated across the Atlantic, in the music of industrial bands like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. And yet William Reid denies the band's "noise" credentials: "We always hated it when people, even among our own fans, said we should just make noise with guitars. Our strength has always been writing songs. We never wanted to be the masters of noise. We never wanted to be just an underground band". Thanks to the elixir concocted by Reid and co., punk found a second life. And British rock found a way out of the dangerous dead end it was heading into in the mid-Eighties.

Damage And Joy (2017) gives us a band true to its own history, carried forward with consistency and dignity for over thirty years; the opening "Amputation" kicks off at once with a riff typical of the Scots, in which they define themselves as the half-decayed offspring of rock music ("I'm a rock and roll amputation"). The dark-wave ballad "War On Peace" evokes the dark splendour of Darklands, only to be torn apart by a chaotic post-punk finale. Elsewhere it's melody that sets the pace and the rules; but it's a sickly, depressed melody, a languid, narcotised song shared with vocalist Bernadette Denning on the aptly titled "Always Sad", or with the sighing, weightless voice of sister Linda Reid on "Los Feliz (Blues and Greens)", "Can't Stop The Rock", or in the dreamy pop duet with Isobel Campbell on "Song For A Secret". The alternation of frantic rhythms ("Get On Home"), acoustic ballads ("Black And Blues", featuring singer Sky Ferreira) and pop tracks ("The Two Of Us", which closely "recalls" "I Could Be Dreaming" by Belle And Sebastian) works mainly for those nostalgic for a season now gone. The Reid brothers' ideas haven't changed and - unlike in the Nineties, when a certain influence from the typical genres of that decade was evident (grunge, Britpop) - in this case it doesn't feel like nineteen years have passed at all, but rather that time has stood still. This leads one to believe that one of the album's limitations is its excessive length (53 minutes), an element that seems at odds with the deafening, barely ten-minute gigs of their early days.

The overall impression is that – after nearly twenty years away – the Jesus And Mary Chain have once again proven themselves consistent protagonists of their own era, much less so of the present day, seeming so detached from it that Damage And Joy could almost pass for a well-crafted revival exercise. A consistency that could just as easily be mistaken for stagnation, like seeing the glass half full or half empty; everyone will see one or the other in the "new" Jesus And Mary Chain, depending on their own personal taste.

Their eighth record Glasgow Eyes (2024) cautiously attempts to break away, at least in part, from the band's past output, offering a sort of homecoming set in a nocturnal Glasgow, among shadows and memories of excessive drug abuse, seasoned with synthesizers, dark electronics and krautrock touches, folded into the noisy recipe of pop, post-punk and alt-rock devised by Jim and William Reid. The album opens decently with the mistreated electronics of the dynamic "Venal Joy", a track sung alongside Fay Fife of the Rezillos and lit up by motorik-style jolts, which acts as a manifesto and gives a general sense of the record's sound. It's followed by the darting, vacuous "American Born", which looks back to the tracks on "Automatic", reworking their rhythms and layered textures, and the missed opportunity of "Mediterranean X Film", which just about scrapes by thanks to some decent sonic ideas in its bassline-driven first half, only to lose itself in an uselessly long and flat ending. The Reid brothers' signature guitar hallmarks from their great classics make a triumphant, hallucinated and synthetic appearance in "Jamcod", delivering a divisive result that could have marked a decisive turning point, pushing them further away from their comfort zone.

The award for most pointless track (and arguably most hideous) goes to "Discotheque", whose dark notes drift off toward robotic space-rock shores, while "Pure Poor" seems to take apart and lay out in slow motion the guitar riffs of a pseudo-ballad like "Nine Million Rainy Days", from "Darklands". The psychedelia and melodies of the Fab Four blend with hard rock-style guitars on "The Eagles And The Beatles", clearing the way for the far more welcome wait sustained by the hypnotic rhythms of "Silver Strings" and the distant echoes of "Chemical Animal", right up to the semi-ballad "Second Of June", which brings back the mood of the tracks from "Stoned And Dethroned". The light-hearted "Girl 71" shifts the focus toward power-pop, closing the journey with "Hey Lou Reid", whose title plays on the name of the beloved frontman of the Velvet Underground, to whom our duo have always been devoted (and it shows in this track too), and the Scottish brothers' own surname.

Glasgow Eyes constantly walks a tightrope, alternating a number of pleasant ideas with quite a few blanks fired in vain, amounting to yet another missed opportunity for a genuine relaunch of the Jesus And Mary Chain project. However, knowing the fiercely provocative nature of the ironic Reid brothers, it's safe to bet that the result is exactly what they set out to achieve, beyond any possible attempt at definition. A testament album? A transitional record pointing toward something genuinely new? It's fair to say that "for better or worse, the important thing is that people are talking about it", and here there will certainly be no shortage of talking points.

Contributions by Valerio D'Onofrio ("Damage And Joy") and Martina Vetrugno ("Glasgow Eyes")

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