Vinyl Me, D - A Free Record Club

Yer Ol' Uncle D said:
Tell your wife I'm sorry.
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Based on your description when you sent out the record, I knew that this was a "Djxfactor511 alone at home" listen. :LOL:

First impressions:

This was pretty close to the vague reputation that I remembered about Jesus and Mary Chain. Noisy. A little shoegazy. Dare I say goth rock?

To my very inexperienced ears in this genre, this sounds like a British, more goth influenced version of what the more alt-rock influenced Sonic Youth became in the US. Both are not in my immediate wheelhouse, but something I'm certainly not opposed to. (I'm sitting here typing this while looking at my CD copy of Daydream Nation that I bought in high school)

Curious on how this record grows on me like the aforementioned Daydream Nation did. Not completely sure if the comparison even hits logically, but that's where my brain went.
 
Psychocandy was released on 11.18.85.

Somehow, through some otherworldly intervention, a radio station I could actually pick up in rural western NC, a region steeped in country and southern rock, played "Just Like Honey" on a "new music" show that got a whole hour of programming on Sunday nights and my life was changed forever.

The next day I went to my local (I actually had one back then) and had them order this record for me. The rest is history.

Psychocandy is one of the most impactful debuts of all time. Nothing sounded exactly like it before. Nothing has sounded exactly like it since. Much like the first Velvet Underground record, the Jesus And Mary Chain debut, at time of release, sold modestly but wielded massive influence on future bands.

This is truly a record like no other. It's punk. It's Beach Boys. It's shoegaze. It's The Ronettes. It's avant garde. It's sugary sweet pop melodies buried underneath a wall of fuzz and feedback.

It's beautiful.
 
Here's my compilation review. But, before that, I'll say that I really dig this. It's funny, because each song "reminds me" of another song or band, but then I realize that said song/band came after this album and was likely directly influenced. I also hear some Joey Ramone in the vocals. Love me some fuzz!!!

Anyways..

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.

Their debut album Psychocandy successfully fuses the snot and angst of punk with it’s feedback laden guitars, reverb soaked vocals and grinding bass, with the simple, melodic structure of early 1960s girl groups such as The Ronettes. Songs like Never Understand or You Trip Me Up could fit in perfectly with anything a sleazy underground club in England plays at 2am, but there is a certain sense of nostalgic charm hidden behind the wall of noisy guitars and white noise. Something so inviting, it makes The Jesus And Mary Chain much more inviting than threatening. Despite their live performances sometimes ending in bloody fits of violence and riots, I get the same sense of familiarity of listening to the local oldies station as an 8 year old when I play this record.

Wall of sound is the best way to describe this album. It's a mess of noise and static. Washed over multiple times in each track, the production duties of the band as well as the engineering of John Loder really helped JAMC achieve their desired direction of being a guitar band amongst the emerging electronic dance scene of the 80's.

The third brand of noise is found on the band’s mid-tempo pop songs, found on tracks such as “The Hardest Walk,” “Taste of Cindy” or “My Little Underground.” Each of the previously mentioned songs is a fuzzy pop gem on their own, the first dealing with a break up, the second with obsession over the eponymous girl in the song and the third about escaping to isolate oneself from the world. These three-chord or four-chord songs are the ones that are easiest to latch on to and often the catchiest offerings on the album, particularly “My Little Underground” with its sing along chorus that concludes with some well-placed “uh-oh-ohs.”

If The Kinks put a little heroin in their coffee. If Brian Wilson kicked his recording equipment for three hours before spewing a mishmash of new songs he'd thought up only a day before. If Dinosaur Jr. all turned into girls and had the sexiest pillow-fight imaginable. If The Velvet Underground actually made their debut album into some pinnacle of pop music instead of the sorry route that album ended up taking (I know, unpopular opinion...). If all of those individual, "What if?"s jumped into a vat and had some corrosive liquid washed over them so that their chemical and spiritual embodiments all became one with this caustic muck, then freeze-dried it and sliced off a slab, and THEN let every person who was in this band at the time eat a little piece... well, that's clearly where the music came from. Hell, that's even where the term 'psychocandy' arose from. This record is a homage to those days where we all feel a little off, where our motivation to succeed and to just make something better for ourselves is more prevalent to us than anything we know. This isn't an album without its quirks or soft spots, but my god, it's one that needs to be heard by everybody.

This record is a great place to start if you haven’t checked this band out as well as the shoegaze genre. Most of the songs clock in at a lean runtime of under three minutes, and feature plenty of melodic hooks despite being lethally noisy. The yin and yang nature is the heart and soul of what makes the record special. It’s just as much The Stooges as it is The Shangri-Las. It’s as ugly as it is beautiful, living up to it’s title. It’s one of my all time favorite records by one of my all time favorite bands.

Another home run! I'm surprised I never listened to this before. Thanks, D!
 
Djxfactor511 said:
Based on your description when you sent out the record, I knew that this was a "Djxfactor511 alone at home" listen. :LOL:

First impressions:

This was pretty close to the vague reputation that I remembered about Jesus and Mary Chain. Noisy. A little shoegazy. Dare I say goth rock?

To my very inexperienced ears in this genre, this sounds like a British, more goth influenced version of what the more alt-rock influenced Sonic Youth became in the US. Both are not in my immediate wheelhouse, but something I'm certainly not opposed to. (I'm sitting here typing this while looking at my CD copy of Daydream Nation that I bought in high school)

Curious on how this record grows on me like the aforementioned Daydream Nation did. Not completely sure if the comparison even hits logically, but that's where my brain went.
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In the sonic youth book they talk about touring England around this time and JAMC were blowing up and they'd get a lot of comparisons, which SY thought were not very accurate because JAMC would do like, four shows and then take a summer off because of exhaustion, when SY was doing a show a day for weeks on end
 
I saw The Jesus And Mary Chain on the 30th anniversary tour celebrating Psychocandy.

I was nervous for them and I. I didn't know if they had it in them three decades down the road to bring all the intense aspects together that made Psychocandy such a special record. I didn't know if I had it in me to accept what this thing might turn out to be 30 years later.

Turns out neither of us had anything to worry about.

Live At Barrowland is a great companion to Psychocandy...

 
Yer Ol' Uncle D said:
I saw The Jesus And Mary Chain on the 30th anniversary tour celebrating Psychocandy.

I was nervous for them and I. I didn't know if they had it in them three decades down the road to bring all the intense aspects together that made Psychocandy such a special record. I didn't know if I had it in me to accept what this thing might turn out to be 30 years later.

Turns out neither of us had anything to worry about.

Live At Barrowland is a great companion to Psychocandy...

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I have heard you extol the virtues of JAMC since like 2015, and we’ve had some convos about this band, and still they haven’t really clicked for me (in my admittedly limited efforts at listening). I think it’s finally time I invest in Psychocandy and do the work.
 
Psymon said:
I have heard you extol the virtues of JAMC since like 2015, and we’ve had some convos about this band, and still they haven’t really clicked for me (in my admittedly limited efforts at listening). I think it’s finally time I invest in Psychocandy and do the work.
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I don't know how @Yer Ol' Uncle D feels about it, but IMO all the JAMC albums from the 90s (psychocandy, darklands, automatic, honey's dead, stoned & dethroned) are wonderful and all essential, with only a slight drop-off at 1998's Munki. I first got into them via the 21 singles comp, which IMO is not a bad way -- you get all the popular tracks in one go -- but the albums themselves are well worth digging into. They manage a thing that is not really common: all their albums are in and of themselves a piece, but they're all different from each other while still being recognizably "their sound" (pre-breakup skinny puppy does this too).

The reformation "Damage & Joy" album is good -- really good actually -- but the earlier albums are such a high standard that it comes off as just good instead.
 
scotthilk said:
The third brand of noise is found on the band’s mid-tempo pop songs, found on tracks such as “The Hardest Walk,” “Taste of Cindy” or “My Little Underground.” Each of the previously mentioned songs is a fuzzy pop gem on their own, the first dealing with a break up, the second with obsession over the eponymous girl in the song and the third about escaping to isolate oneself from the world. These three-chord or four-chord songs are the ones that are easiest to latch on to and often the catchiest offerings on the album, particularly “My Little Underground” with its sing along chorus that concludes with some well-placed “uh-oh-ohs.”
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Spot on. These are three great songs. I've always adored MLU...

Sun shines so high, bright in the sky
Sun shines so, sun shines so
Sun shines so high above
And it's cold outside, doesn't work out right
Doesn't work out right, gonna stay inside
I'm gonna run and find a place where I can hide
Somewhere that no one knows, someplace that no one goes
So don't you look for me, I'll be where you can't see
Somewhere I can't be found, my little underground
Uh oh oh

The 'My Little Underground' > 'You Trip me Up' is absolutely lethal on the Live At Barrowland record...


 
yukbon said:
I don't know how @Yer Ol' Uncle D feels about it, but IMO all the JAMC albums from the 90s (psychocandy, darklands, automatic, honey's dead, stoned & dethroned) are wonderful and all essential, with only a slight drop-off at 1998's Munki. I first got into them via the 21 singles comp, which IMO is not a bad way -- you get all the popular tracks in one go -- but the albums themselves are well worth digging into. They manage a thing that is not really common: all their albums are in and of themselves a piece, but they're all different from each other while still being recognizably "their sound" (pre-breakup skinny puppy does this too).

The reformation "Damage & Joy" album is good -- really good actually -- but the earlier albums are such a high standard that it comes off as just good instead.
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Good summation. This Jesus And Mary Chain just never made a subpar record. And they also never rested on their laurels - every record was different than the one before and the one after.

As far as what I listen to the most, I'll put Munki in my top 4. While the Reid brothers were splintering during the making of this record, I love the different personalities and styles that surface in the songs.

No better example than the album opener and closer...

Jim - 'I Love Rock 'n' Roll'




William - 'I Hate Rock 'n' Roll'

 
Here's a sweet montage of my recording of The Jesus And Mary Chain at Hopscotch in 2012. Alas, I was technically an employee of the festival as everything was comped for my taping abilities. They still haven't cleared sharing this material in a complete form 10 years down the road. Not cool.

This was one of the greatest musical nights of my life. I saw Built To Spill and The Jesus And Mary Chain on the main stage and immediately broke down my rig and hustled a few blocks away to a small theatre and set up to record Yo La Tengo.

That's a triple bill, folks...

 
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