The Jesus and Mary Chain - Damage and Joy

Drowned In Sound 70

Looking back through the past 30 years it seems The Jesus & Mary Chain have always been on hand to provide that shot of adrenaline at the right time. While Psychocandy rebelled against all that was synthetic and saccharine in the mid-Eighties, Honey's Dead kicked grunge into touch seven years on while Stoned & Dethroned and Munki bookended the birth and death of Britpop in all its self-aggrandising glory.

So here we are today. Nineteen years on from the last Jesus & Mary Chain album, where Coldplay are the biggest alternative rock band in the world and Ed Sheeran becomes the fastest selling recording artist ever. 'Pop music is dreadful', said Jim Reid in a recent interview and while it's unlikely today's musical svengalis construct ditties aimed at miserable fifty-somethings from East Kilbride he clearly has a point. The advent of punk and its subsequent subcultures should have led to a better future yet somewhere down the line it failed.

But then the most timeless music in history never looked at the competition for inspiration. Never cared about what was going on in the next room. Or across the road. Or as the quietly but outspoken frontman put it when he spoke to DiS recently, "The way to do it is not to look around you at what everybody else is doing." And on Damage And Joy, the first new collection of songs to be given the Jesus & Mary Chain stamp in nearly two decades, they've done just that.

Enlisting the tried and tested methods of Killing Joke bassist-cum-producer extraordinaire Martin 'Youth' Glover in the recording room, Damage And Joy feels to all intents and purposes like a typical Jesus & Mary Chain. No artificial flavours or colouring as it were, just a no holds barred rock and roll record that pretty much does what it says on the tin. That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. Without harking back too much at the Reid brothers' legacy. And let's face it, when that includes such artifacts as 'Upside Down' and Psychocandy in the locker it's always going to be difficult not to draw comparisons.

However, what's always set the Mary Chain apart from their peers and contemporaries – while ultimately ensuring their influence has become predominant in guitar music ever since – has been that reluctance to stand still. As distinctive as their sound may be, no one can ever suggest any tow Jesus & Mary Chain albums sound the same and Damage And Joy follows suit.

Some of these songs will be familiar to those who've followed the Reid brothers' every note of recorded output in recent years. Opener 'Amputation' first surfaced a decade ago under the guise of 'Dead End Kids' both as a Jim Reid solo single and part of his short-lived Freeheat project. 'Song For A Secret', 'Can't Stop The Rock' and 'The Two Of Us' all saw the light of day in 2005, having originally been released under the guise of Sister Vanilla, the group Jim Reid formed with his sister Linda who sings backing vocals on two of the songs here.

Arguably the most instantly accessible four-and-a-half minutes here belong to 'All Things Must Pass', a song which first saw the light of day in 2008 and has regularly featured in the band's live set over the past couple of years. Revitalised and given a new lease of life on Damage and Joy, it quickly becomes the album's centre of attention, Reid junior spitting lyrics like "Each drug I take, it's gonna be my last" over a nagging, insistent riff that stands proud among the Mary Chain's finest.

Also regaling past glories yet adding a twenty-first-century air of nonchalance is the sombre 'War On Peace' which manages to combine the spirits of both 'Almost Gold' and 'Some Candy Talking'. Meanwhile, 'Presidici (Et Chapaquiditch)' fuses William Reid's trademark guitar sound with one of his brother's finest vocal performances to date, its overriding message clear as daylight intoning "If you can't love yourself it's bad for your health."

Vocal duets have been an omnipresent feature throughout the band's lifespan so it's no surprise that six of Damage and Joy's 14 pieces feature contributions from a wide range of collaborators. Isobel Campbell's delicately poised voice fits the subtly executed 'Song For A Secret' like a hand to a glove while 'The Two Of Us' could be a long lost Belle & Sebastian outtake in a parallel universe. William Reid's girlfriend Bernadette Denning also comes up smelling of roses on 'Always Sad', another of the record's pivotal if melancholy numbers, while Sky Ferreira's appearance on lo-fi country lament 'Black And Blues' seems poignantly handpicked for someone of her demeanour.

Elsewhere, 'Facing Up To The Facts' references the Reids' well documented spats of the past ("I hate my brother and he hates me") while 'Simian Split' questions the death of Kurt Cobain in the Jesus & Mary Chain's own sardonic way.

Although not entirely perfect. And it's highly unlikely even the most wisened Mary Chain diehard would have expected it to be. Damage and Joy heralds the dawning of a new era in its creators' colourful history, providing a worthwhile addition to a canon of musical eminence in the process.

Pitchfork 67

Whether they’re playing 15-minute gigs or taking 19 years between albums, the Jesus and Mary Chain have always put a lot of care into the appearance of not giving a fuck. Ever since they first erected their wall of squall on 1985’s Psychocandy, brothers Jim and William Reid have remained permanent residents of a world where sunglasses never come off, cigarette smoke doubles as dry ice, and the only illumination is provided by strobe light. None of the albums they’ve released since has sounded quite the same, but they all invariably feel the same. As the Mary Chain’s first full-length since the late ’90s proves, it will take more than a nearly two-decade recording hiatus to diminish the band’s intrinsic ultraviolet vibe.

Despite the epic lag between releases, Damage and Joy feels very much like a logical extension of its predecessor, 1998’s seeming swan song Munki, because the Reids had been unwittingly leaving a breadcrumb trail between the two records this whole time. Half of its 14 tracks are re-recordings of songs that were previously released in some form—as Jim Reid solo releases or as part of their sister Linda’s Sister Vanilla venture. In the case, of “All Things Pass,” it’s a revved-up revamp of the lone song the Mary Chain have officially released since the Reids buried the hatchet back in 2007 (because, presumably, leaving it for dead on the “Heroes” soundtrack seemed too ignoble a fate). Jim recently told Pitchfork that all those castaway tracks “really should have been Mary Chain songs,” if only the brothers’ notoriously combative relationship hadn’t deep-sixed the band after Munki.

By that time, the Reids had eagerly accepted their destiny as cranky old men. Where Psychocandy used harsh noise to conceal tender feelings, Munki’s streamlined motorik’n’roll laid the middle-aged Mary Chain’s hilariously hateful lyrics bare. (It’s hard to pick a favorite from “Commercial”: “McDonald’s is shit!” or “Children are fools!”) They were always an insolent band, but Munki marked the first time the Reids seemed to be having fun with being assholes. And on Damage and Joy, that regression continues apace, with the Reids acting like 50-going-on-15, giddily riffing on drugs, guns, erections, girls with curls, and “fly”/“high” rhymes you can spot from miles away.

Beyond the blatant nods to the group’s past (“Song for a Secret”—one of two duets with Isobel Campbell—manages to sound like “Sometimes Always” and “Just Like Honey” simultaneously), some of the brothers’ lyrics sound here like they were actually salvaged from an early ’90s scrapbook. The puerile robo-blues romp “Get on Home” finds Jim spending a night with a “blow-up girl,” “some LSD,” and “the MTV”; William’s ridiculous “Simian Split” rehashes a hoary old Kurt Cobain murder conspiracy as if the song was written after watching the El Duce interview in Nick Broomfield’s Kurt and Courtney. And then there’s “Facing Up To the Facts,” on which Jim unleashes a corker that could’ve easily materialized at any point in the Mary Chain’s history: “I hate my brother and he hates me/That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

But it’s easy for the Reids to milk that line for laughs, because Damage and Joy sounds bereft of any conflict or tension. The brothers made the record with producer/bassist Youth (with support from touring drummer Brian Young and Lush bassist Phil King), and it feels more like an intimate recording project than a live band document, mostly splitting the difference between routine electro-Stones rave-ups and strung-out ballads. The Reids score most consistently in the latter category, likely because it forces them to keep their adolescent id in check and deal with more adult emotions. The illicit-affair account “Black and Blues” is gilded gospel Americana dressed up in Velvet-y “ba ba bas” and a winsome guest vocal from Sky Ferreira, who’s thus far batting 1.000 in duets with Scottish rock institutions. And the Spacemen 3-style stoner jangle of “War on Peace” grapples with every aging rebel’s existential crisis—“What if I run?/Where would I run to?”—before issuing a proverbial “fuck it” and stomping on the pedal for an adrenalized, fuzz-powered finale.

But the biggest eye opener is album centerpiece “Los Feliz (Blues and Greens).” This luminous, orchestral acoustic lullaby plays like a misanthropic answer to Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” its idyllic California scenery—topped with a chorus of “God bless America!”—undercut by a deep-seated despair (“In the land of the free/Wishing they were dead”). Where they were once defined by a collision of face-melting feedback and soothing melody, the modern-day Mary Chain are governed by a different set of extremes: the pent-up desire to act like goofy, hormonal teenagers and the sobering knowledge those days are long gone. But as the brothers recruit their sister/mediator Linda for a closing reboot of Sister Vanilla’s “Can’t Stop the Rock,” the song’s cheery rallying cry—“I’m falling, and I’m happy!”—carries the reassurance that now, more than ever, the Jesus and Mary Chain are united in holy acrimony.

The Guardian 60

(ADA/Warner)

Related: The Jesus and Mary Chain – 10 of the best

The first Mary Chain album in 19 years kicks off in fine fettle: Amputation grumbles along on a William Reid riff that’s half biker rock, half pure 60s pop, before his brother Jim’s opening line sets out the challenge facing the pair: “Try to win your interest back / But you ain’t having none of that.” When they follow it with War on Peace, a splendid ballad that overcomes its debt to the Velvet Underground’s Ocean through sheer stateliness, then all seems set fair. But there are problems. First, half of these 14 songs have been recorded before, by one or other Reid-related project. Second, the references to the past are sometimes just a bit heavy-handed (“I hate my brother and he hates me / That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” from Facing Up to the Facts, cribs directly from Kill Surf City, but for using “brother” instead of “baby”). Third, there’s an awful lot of it – 53 minutes is just too much. Even after the magnesium flare of Psychocandy, the Mary Chain had their greatest effect in brevity; the more you get of them, the less forceful they feel. It’s a lot better than it might have been, but not quite as great as one might have hoped.

The Guardian 60

(ADA/Warner Music)
The Reid brothers’ first album since 1998 contains old and new songs and moments of pure bliss

There is guitar music driven by testosterone and showboating, and then there is rock’n’roll made by anaemic runts with a sneer. If you are at all receptive to passive-aggressive siren songs, you’ll have heard of Scotland’s Jesus and Mary Chain.

A pair of dyspeptic brothers (and a supporting cast of long-suffering helpmeets), their misanthropic sulking has always been offset by their sweet tooth – and their jelly legs in the face of girls. After a noisy run in the late 80s and early to mid-90s, when the Mary Chain graduated from being the darlings of the UK music press to transatlantic alt rock lodestones, their last studio album was 1998’s appallingly named Munki. Even by the Mary Chain’s declining standards, it was merely all right and the band split acrimoniously in 1999.

Related: The Jesus and Mary Chain: ‘Pop is dreadful. Switch on a radio, I guarantee it’ll be garbage’