Review Summary: Conflict
Conflict is what defines The Jesus and Mary Chain’s career. It’s what drove the brothers Reid haphazardly through the spotlight over decades, and it’s what drove
Psychocandy to encapsulate an ideal the brothers could never fully capture again - no matter whether they tried or not. It’s what drove an unhealthy marriage of proto-punk and pop music, apathetic morbidity set in the California beaches of 1965, trying too hard to look like they never tried hard enough. There are rarely more than three chords on any given track; hell, the Reids practically copy-pasted the first forty seconds of their now-seminal classic “Just Like Honey”
just ten tracks later. Note for note, transposed down a tone or two. And yet, in this limited framework lies a simple, pleasurable creativity, intent on expressing love for the pop genre and maliciously twisting it all the while. Any retroactive critical acclaim, or influence on the scene of tomorrow, is just the icing on the cake.
Goth music could hear the angst of “God spits on my soul” or sexual frustration in “Eating up the scum” and go even further into despair. Shoegaze could take the deafening cacophony of tightly-controlled feedback and, by 1991, turn it into an alien and ethereal beauty. Yet there was never the sense of duality that
Psychocandy encompassed, nor was there the sheer
violence of the Reids’ will to record the album exactly as they wanted. It’s both a product of the sound and the personalities, but each collision of Jim Reid’s low register and William Reid’s explosive leads sounds like it could escalate into a brawl. Sometimes it actually does, when “Taste the Floor” drowns Jim out in the mix in favour of a feedback tsunami. It would be worrisome, yet the sweetness of old always brings a sense of comfort to the equation; how can we break into a riot now, when we’ve made something so fragile in the process?
Perhaps the crux of
Psychocandy is that each listening experience is a conflict in its own right. The Reids go too far too often – where the introduction of “In a Hole” fails to resemble anything at all, except maybe tinnitus, and the ballads hit like a fire drill. Nonetheless, there’s a solemn reward in fighting through the Reids’ vision, fighting through the anger to reach a soft “I’ll be where you can’t see… my little underground.” It’s the never-ending struggle between audience and artist that makes this fleeting vulnerability all the more beautiful. For every embrace and optimistic “There’s something wrong,” there’s a snide remark somewhere later down the line that fires up conflict all over again. In that sense,
Psychocandy is one of the most paradoxically accessible records in musical history; a little something for everyone who goes looking, and a sloppy middle finger for everyone no matter what, before stumbling back into the set.
