Candy crush saga
The brothers Reid deliver their first LP in 19 years. By Keith Cameron.
Damage And Joy ARTIFICIAL PLASTIC/WARNER MUSIC. CD/DL/LP
IN 2006, Jim Reid released a solo single called Dead End Kids. It was great – a synthetic beat-driven sleaze blues, oddly suggestive of Suicide covering Bruce Springsteen’s Pink Cadillac – but no one heard it, besides the few Jesus And Mary Chain diehards keeping the faith almost 10 years after Reid’s acrimonious estrangement from brother William. Now, Dead End Kids finally has its day: retitled Amputation, it opens The Jesus And Mary Chain’s comeback album. Beneath the new name and spiffier production, Amputation is the same song, with a lyric depicting Jim “trying to win your interest back”: a forgotten man feeling amputated from the rock’n’roll world which had until relatively recently venerated him and his brother William as sonic visionaries. Amputation isn’t the only lost soul to find a home on Damage And Joy. Three songs were released by Jim Reid’s post-Mary Chain band Freeheat, thereby predating Dead End Kids by five years. Album closer Can’t Stop The Rock was recorded in 2005 by Sister Vanilla, aka Jim and William’s younger sister Linda. All Things Pass is the former All Things Must Pass, which appeared on the 2008 soundtrack to NBC TV series Heroes, hinting that the siblings’ recent on-stage reunion might lead to recording a new album. For this to have taken almost another 10 years – and with seven of its 14 tracks previously available in alternative guises – hardly suggests a fount of creativity. Yet song-for-song Damage And Joy is the most rewarding Jesus And Mary Chain album since their prime, when Psychocandy condemned the Reids to the impossible task of emulating perfection. It even sounds like it was fun to do. Credit to Youth, who as producer (and doubtless peacemaker) has resisted bulking up the sound, instead emphasising the naivety that underpinned the early Jesus And Mary Chain’s chaotic brinkmanship. Following Amputation’s nimble welcome, War On Peace is a quintessential JAMC hymn to enervation, siphoning the body and spirit of The Velvet Underground’s Ocean then adding wheezy amp distress, lonesome guitar twang and “ah-ah”s in an awestruck lament for time’s passing: “I once shone but now I’m old.” The ensuing All Things Pass junks its previous version’s hi-carb rock for brittle grooves that better suit the lyric’s numbed trash talk: “Every drug I take, it’s gonna be my last/I hope I don’t fry, I hope I don’t die.” Through the prism of middle-age, there’s a new poignancy to such hallmark nihilism. Exile has clearly raised the stakes in gallows humour too. “I killed Kurt Cobain/I put the shot right through his brain/And his wife gave me the job/’Cos I'm a big fat lying slob,” declares William on the self-produced Simian Split, a more palatable variant on his solo Lazycame releases. He switches to widescreen powerpop on Presidici (Et Chapaquiditch), a bittersweet reprise of Reverence’s JFK obsession (“A messed up head is better than none”) that also revisits the brothers’ formative days: “We grew up with the Spiders and the Beatles from Mars/Tiger Feet and the T.Rex cars.” Jim, meanwhile, dusts down Sidewalking’s primordial riff to underpin Facing Up To The Facts’ merry Farfisa-flecked negaholia: “I hate my brother and he hates me/ That’s the way it’s supposed to be.” Fellow Scottish enigma Isobel Campbell supplies femme fatality on Song For A Secret and the sweetly euphoric The Two Of Us. Deploying the Nancy & Lee duet gambit ought to be a moribund concept by now, but on these songs and Can’t Stop The Rock – featuring sister Linda – it feels like the Reids are reconnecting with the pure impulses of what drove their younger selves to dream beyond the mundane reality of life in an East Kilbride sitting room. Remarkably, then, Damage And Joy is spiritually closer to the band’s original age of innocence than any of the subsequent records they ground out in the name of maintaining a career. You could call it an unforeseeable triumph – except that in 2006, with prospects of a reunion as yet remote, the Mary Chain’s erstwhile patron Alan McGee proclaimed William Reid a genius, then offered MOJO an oddly specific prediction: “William could still blow everyone away. At 59 he could come back and you’d go ‘Fuck, he’s still got it.’” William Reid turns 59 this year. Now that’s candy talking.