(PRESALE - SHIPS 11-14-25)

GOLD SWIRL VINYL

The Jesus and Mary Chain were at their most abrasive with their 1985 debut Psychocandy, but the album's washes of caustic feedback and shrillness were a necessary component of what ended up being their mission statement: girl group melodies swaddled in unrelenting noise for a sound that pushed rock & roll to new, dangerous places. While there were some clear predecessors to the Jesus and Mary Chain's ragged melodicism -- obviously, the spartan proto-punk minimalism of the Velvet Underground, and perhaps less blatantly, the naïve outlook of the Beach Boys viewed through the cracked lens of speed freakouts -- an entire album of something this simultaneously raw and tuneful was revelational. The elements the band would refine for years to come were all there in blazing colors from the beginning. The buzzsaw guitars of songs like "In a Hole" or "Taste the Floor" walked a tenuous line between music and complete chaos, and when the band did dabble with recognizable structure in moments like the straightforward three-chord repetition of "You Trip Me Up," they included multiple layers of disorienting feedback to keep it from coming too close to pop. The "Be My Baby" beat that begins the album on "Just Like Honey" points unambiguously to Phil Spector/girl group influences, and this tune, along with other relatively sweet instances like "Taste of Cindy" or "The Hardest Walk," represents the conflicted melodic core of Psychocandy. Even gentler entries (like the acoustic guitars, lonesome tambourine hits, and clouds of reverb that make up "Cut Dead") predicted the direction of dream pop movements that cropped up in following years, much like the album's balance of confusion and bliss paved the way for shoegaze, and the band's detached post-Velvets cool would become a starting point for certain camps of '90s and early-2000s Brit-pop. By mid-'80s standards, the antagonistic guitar destruction and willfully disorienting production of Psychocandy were all but unlistenable, and time hasn't really softened that intensity. The strengths of this set of early songs have also been tested by time, and they've only grown stranger, wilder, more intriguing, and more exciting as the years have moved forward. The album ranks among the most impressive debuts of any act, and continues to send ripples of influence and distinction through subsequent waves of disaffected noisemakers with secret pop hearts.

A1        Just Like Honey
A2        The Living End
A3        Taste The Floor
A4        The Hardest Walk
A5        Cut Dead
A6        In A Hole
A7        Taste Of Cindy
B1        Never Understand
B2        Inside Me
B3        Sowing Seeds
B4        My Little Underground
B5        You Trip Me Up
B6        Something's Wrong
B7        It's So Hard