The Jesus and Mary Chain
Glasgow Eyes
FUZZ CLUB
Usually, a seven year wait for an album would come with reputation-breaking potential. After all, that’s a long time in the music industry—and not least when the band in question is as iconic as The Jesus and Mary Chain. But then again, seven years is nothing for the influential Scottish band. There was an almost two-decade gap between 1998’s Munki and 2017’s Damage and Joy. Admittedly, that was because the band broke up the year after the former was released, but that only made the stakes for the latter album even higher. So while the length of time between Damage and Joy and the new Glasgow Eyes might have crushed other bands, for founding members/brothers Jim and William Reid, it’s a duration of relative insignificance, especially when you factor a global pandemic into the equation.
And while the band have always consciously gone against the grain—responding, for example, to the acclaim their feedback-drenched 1985 debut Psychocandy garnered by releasing a follow-up, Darklands, that sounded nothing like it—Glasgow Eyes shimmers with an even bigger sense of freedom, of shackles being shed. Opener “Venal Joy” bursts out of the speakers with aggressive verve, a constant, swaggering surge of don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. But just as you think the tone has been set, the gentle, almost whimsical, quasi-new-wave of “American Born” kicks in and switches up the album’s trajectory. From there, it’s kind of a free-for-all, bouncing from the sunny (yet simultaneously gloomy) post-punk experimentation of “Mediterranean X Film,” to the nihilistic noise and electronics of “jamcod,” to the wayward and discordant melody of “Pure Poor,” to the almost sultry late-nightness of “Chemical Animal.”
The balls-out rock ’n’ roll of “The Eagles and The Beatles”—which serves as more of a tribute to The Rolling Stones and to growing up with that music soundtracking all the bad decisions of youth—is a slight misstep, but only because it sounds more like the bands it pays homage to than it does The Jesus and Mary Chain. Still, the glowering, pulsating “Silver Strings” and the gentle but constantly swelling, melancholy, psychedelic jangle of “Second of June” and the unpredictable meanderings of closer “Hey Lou Reid” prove that they’re not just resting on their laurels but still creating art designed to challenge and fulfill as much as their songs ever did. As the band celebrate their 40th birthday, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s reputation remains impressively intact.
