560. The Jesus and Mary Chain - Psychocandy (1985)
















Track Listing

1. Just Like Honey
2. Living End
3. Taste The Floor
4. Hardest Walk
5. Cut Dead
6. In A Hole
7. Taste Of Cindy
8. Never Understand
9. Inside Me
10. Sowing Seeds
11. My Little Underground
12. You Trip Me Up
13. Something's Wrong
14. It's So Hard

Review

The Jesus & Mary Chain present us with an interesting proposal, making pop songs and drowning them in feedback and noise. I am interested in their proposal and would like to subscribe to their newsletter.

But interested is really the word, I am not particularly riveted, but I like it, I like the concept of it and I hope they will eventually refine it into something even better. At the moment they sound like Velvet Underground's poor cousin.

Still the fact that they sound somewhat like VU makes them a huge highlight in the mid 80s, and the music is fascinating, it is also particularly fascinating to listen to it at very low volume, where only highest ranges of the feedback come through, but that makes for a less pleasant album. In the end it is a mixed bag, with an excellent concept and some real good songs, curiously the slower and less feedbacky ones, showing that under that wall of noise there is a sensitive and very melodic band.

Track Highlights

1. Just Like Honey
2. Cut Dead
3. Taste Of Cindy
4. Taste The Floor

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Psychocandy utilised the then-radical notion of combining simple pop tunes, à la The Beach Boys, with the searing guitar noise more akin to The Velvet Underground, effectively prefiguring shoegaze. The album is considered to be a landmark recording, frequently appearing in various "best-ever" album lists, such as placed at number 88 in 2000 Q magazine list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In 2003, the album was ranked number 268 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Just Like Honey: