The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy (2016)

The best part of Paula Mejia’s 33-1/3 volume has to be her enthusiasm for the band and album. That’s always there in these little books to some degree, but often it is kind of sublimated into the research or something. She had no luck getting one of the Reid brothers (William) to talk to her at all. She may not have cast the interview net very wide, or gotten a lot of good quotes, because that stuff is minimal here. It’s organized by song titles from the album, not in sequencing order but riffing on the ideas associated with them. Like Geeta Dayal’s meditation on Brian Eno’s Another Green World, it is more discursive and (free-) associational. There are fewer personal details too. It might be dense—she cites a lot of academic sources along the way. Or it may have been my mood. I was reading it slowly, a chapter or two at a time, and thinking it might be one of the weaker ones. But then something kind of strange and perhaps alchemical happened. I played the album and it sounded fabulous. Better than ever. Now Psychocandy is an album I’ve had my infatuations with. I didn’t really catch up to it until the 1990s but I had an intense few months with it when I did. But returning to it later—even preparing to read this—was often disappointing. Too much noise, not enough sweets (more or less the shoegaze formula, which more or less the Jesus and Mary Chain may have invented) (although don’t forget Husker Du). A couple points by Mejia definitely helped. How, for one thing, did I miss those girl group drum patterns? Anyway, I don’t think an album under consideration has ever sounded so good while reading one of these 33-1/3 books. One of the regular blurbs that shows up with them talks about liner notes, which, full disclosure, I rarely read. But that’s what the experience of this book came to feel like for me. I’d read some of the text and return to the glorious album. I did learn about the literal riots of their shows in the ‘80s, which I hadn’t known. I think comparisons to the Velvet Underground and Sex Pistols go too far in a general way, though of course they’re not entirely overstated. And the riffing on psychopathy and candy seemed more obvious than insightful. I mean, you can find something to complain about in anything. I’m just a little shocked she somehow found a way to make the album sound better than ever.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.