The Jesus and Mary Chain
Honey's Dead

Simple and sugary Pop melody submerged by a high tide of feedback. This was the sound recipe of Psychocandy (1985), the epochal debut album of the Scottish band Jesus & Mary Chain. The subsequent Darklands (1987) bewildered everyone, as the Reid brothers had changed the ingredients of their psychotic candy, which retained its dark, dreamlike/hallucinatory, and vividly melodic aroma, but was no longer coated by the feedback syrup that enriched and inevitably overshadowed other flavors. With Automatic (1989), as Rock'n'roll troublemakers they were, the Jesus and Mary Chain decided once again not to reheat the soup, but to offer a different dish that maintained the same melodic base, but hardened the sound by resorting, this time, to granite guitars and obsessive drumming from a drum machine, shifting towards hard-pop-punk flavors.

After a beneficial pause for reflection, Jim and William Reid, three years after the previous album, confronted the new decade with Honey's Dead (1992) once again shuffling the cards, or rather the ingredients of their previous records, and crafting their best album since Psychocandy.

On the surface, there may not seem to be many differences between Honey's and its predecessors. Yet it reveals subtle differences and evolutionary progress that make it a cornerstone in the discography of the Jesus And Mary Chain. First and foremost, the electronic drum has been almost entirely dismissed, replaced by Steve Monti, drummer of Curve, who gives the songs a sense of urgency and variety, adding a touch of Madchester sound that fits perfectly with the Jesus and Mary Chain. But what stands out is, above all, that the Reid brothers have created a coherent collection of songs, finally finding the perfect balance between explosive fury and melody, between precision of execution and creativity. The lyrics are immediate and on par with the best moments of the past. Just think of the brilliant and scorching opening of "Reverence," the first single released, in which Jim Reid mockingly sings, "I want to die just like Jesus Christ".

Honey's Dead therefore represents the synthesis of the band's previous efforts. It is danceable like Automatic, elegantly wears the psychedelic pop sensibility of Darklands, and also marks the return of the white noise of the guitar from Psychocandy, proving to be more versatile than even the unsurpassed debut. However, the Jesus And Mary Chain, while playing to differently combine the pieces of their sound puzzle, continue to draw heavily from that primal sound, a progeny of the Stooges and especially of the Velvet Underground, with the addition of a remarkable melodic taste in full sixties style, looking as much to the Beach Boys and the Shangri-Las as to the Rolling Stones. But in the high-proof cocktail of the Jesus and Mary Chain, we also find the darkness and desolation of Suicide and Joy Division and the punk of the Ramones, but if the American punks transformed pop melodies by speeding them up incendiary, the Scots transfigured them by using noise rather than speed.

Honey's Dead is a very solid album from a notoriously unstable band, in which the already mentioned "Reverence," "Far Gone and Out" endowed with immediate and captivating rhythms and melody, the delicate and introspective "Almost Gold," the clattering "Sugar Ray," "Catchfire" with its masterfully layered guitars making it one of the most psychedelic songs in their repertoire, "Good for My Soul," a ballad that reeks of Velvet Underground, and "I Can't Get Enough" which could be a Beatles song if the Liverpudlian quartet had used large doses of distortion and feedback stand out immediately. But all the other tracks are no less. In other words, the songs of Honey's do not point the way towards new horizons but set a surprisingly high-quality standard, blending multiple genres into an exciting, bold, and hedonistic record. Monotonous and blurred guitars screeching over pop melodies, romantic melancholy and self-loathing, alcoholic stupor and shoegaze lethargy, toxic euphoria, and a pair of Ray-Bans. All that is Honey's Dead. All that is the Jesus And Mary Chain.

August 1986. Fresh from the final exams, I left with three friends for the wicked Albion for my first "adult" trip. Backpack, Inter-Rail, Youth Hostels Association card, some money in my pocket. London, concerts, Marquee Club, One Hundred Club, beers, Scotch, pubs, British Museum, pubs, Big Ben, pubs, Buckingham Palace, changing of the guard, pubs, etc. Then the English countryside, Bath, Stonehenge, Oxford. One evening, in the hostel lobby in Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of one William Shakespeare, Scottish guys with a huge Sharp (either you remember them or you've never seen them) started spreading a sound that had something metallurgical about it, it seemed like someone was singing softly over the hum produced by some large industrial machines. That was the first time I listened to the Jesus And Mary Chain. It was "Taste The Floor," the third track from Psychocandy. And that damned hum continues to haunt me to this day.

Fortunately.