Jesus and Mary Chain Go Back to the Future with Glasgow Eyes
After 40 years of recording and performing, The Jesus and Mary Chain prove they can still revel in the best late 20th and early 21st Century musical damage and joy with Glasgow Eyes.
The Jesus and Mary Chain are coming up on a major milestone. The duo, composed of brothers Jim and William Reid, will mark 40 years as a band this year. Along with The Black Crowes, Pearl Jam, Ministry, Kim Gordon, The Rolling Stones, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers (who released two albums in 2022) JAMC have reached multiple decades of longevity and success as rock stars. With Glasgow Eyes, their 8th studio album, and it’s hard to believe it’s only their 8th, JAMC also joins an exclusive group of bands that prove that age is just a number, and good rock tunes are timeless.
Over the course of their long career, JAMC’s sound has evolved from the gothy shoegaze of Psychocandy to the straightforward rock of Darklands and Automatic to the 90s alt-rock and guitar-heavy sound of Honey’s Dead and Munki. Throughout, JAMC’s sound remained instantly recognizable and influenced legions of rock and alt-rock bands along the way. After a lengthy recording hiatus, they returned in 2017 with Damage and Joy, seemingly picking up where they left off with an album that effectively combined aspects of their previous works into one excellently sprawling album.
With Glasgow Eyes, the Brothers Reid lace the expected JAMC guitar heavy formula with Darkwave electronica. This makes many of the songs on the album less easily identifiable with the classic JAMC sound. This is a good thing. The album is still guitar-driven rock, like the album’s straightforward second track “American Born” is. “Mediterranean X Film,” the very next track, is as well but rides a swell of electronic bleeps and bloops. Despite the intrusion of said bleeps and bloops, the song has some of the most interesting guitar lines on the album. They almost feel improvisational, which is certainly something new for the band. The visceral metal of the guitar strings and the cyber cloud programming of the electronica meld together unexpectedly well.
The album’s lead single “jamcod” delivers more of what decades-long fans of the band expect in a JAMC single. While definitely influenced by Darkwave atmospherics, the beat, the riff, and the vocals all scream “This is JAMC as you’ve known them for 4 decades!” It’s a great track that captures what’s best about the band while mixing things up a bit with some contemporary tech sounds. “Discotheques” revisits the electronica of “Mediterranean X Film” while paying lyrical homage to the year 1965. The album’s second longest track, “Pure Poor,” clears the sonic palette with a slow, shoegazey, sludgy guitar slog that will satisfy aging grunge-o-philes.
Alongside “jamcod,” the late album track “Chemical Animal” best embodies the spirit of experimentation that remains tied to classic JAMC themes and sounds. The song’s ethereal Darkwave aesthetic is driven by live drums and a simple guitar riff. “Chemical Animal” evokes the feel of the band’s earliest work while simultaneously taking it in a new direction. It’s a great track, even if it won’t be the album’s biggest single. “Girl 71” starts to bring the album to a close with a loud, wall of guitar riffs that clearly revisits the best pop-rock the band has ever written. Hearing it is like a joyous welcoming of a prodigal artist back into the rock n’ roll fold.
After 40 years of writing and performing some of the most cheerfully depressing rock music, The Jesus and Mary Chain prove with Glasgow Eyes that they are still inspired by pushing themselves to create music that is contradictorily timeless while embodying the tenor of their life and times. A tenor that’s artistically and intellectually rooted in the damage and joy of the late 20th and early 21st Century.
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