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You chew and eat dust swallowing the outskirts of every day, and you don't have time for that sky which hurts just to look at these days, and you can't find time for the spectacle of a sun that again pale, fades behind a city as intolerant as this. Maybe you simply don't want to find it. Stopping would mean stopping fighting. Watching it would mean putting hands on a wound that has remained open, but you do it anyway. Sometimes you need to hurt yourself to bounce back. You rummage inside yourself, through the hazy memories and thoughts of a lifetime, through captured images, records left to gather dust, and a photo of an open road falls into your hands, opening up before you almost as a reminder of who and where you are now. It's "Stoned & Dethroned" by the Jesus & Mary Chain, and it's a moment. You put it on. It's dazzling like the empty road on the cover. It's dusty and luminous, it's sweet and it hurts. You are aware and like that it brings out those feelings in you. You already know what's coming. You're restrained, tense, and that bitter taste that has dried your lips and mouth so far turns into a very sweet candy to rattle between your teeth. And what do you do? You savor it slowly, sucking it sugary and saccharine even if it knots your stomach with its taste of memories. You can't even find the courage to bite it; the sensation is so pleasant.
You would curse them if it helped anything. A little disc like this that melts and unwinds gently, that easily reveals itself track by track, is an easy-listening that you just don't know if you should expect it or not from the two grumpy Scottish brothers. The feedback is abandoned, as are the obsessed and exasperated lyrics and the scratching guitars of the early days. The atmospheres become simple, springlike, barely whispered. The voices are languid. The arrangements are reduced to the minimum: essential, clean, sometimes repetitive and soporific, almost unripe like the words just whispered but never bland or predictable. Such a modest acoustic production that its disarming sweetness captivates you against your will. So you fight, struggling not to give in behind 'She' and 'Save Me'. You rebel, wriggling out of the tight grip of 'Come On' and 'Between Us'. You shake your head, mixing thoughts in 'Sometimes Always' soothed by the melodious voices of Jim Reid and Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star), the first guest on "Stoned & Dethroned" along with Shane McGowan (ex-Pogues) in the tormented 'God Help Me'. You smile enchanted with 'Never Saw It Coming' and the sincere beauty of 'Wish I Could', and you frown again on the disenchanted words of 'Everybody I Know' or the abrupt ones of 'These Days'. Then 'Till It Shines', like gold, alone among the 17 tracks of "Stoned & Dethroned", 'Come, come and dry your eyes, before the morning sun arrives..' And you dry your eyes too, tired and dry of overly blurred images.
You would curse them if it helped anything. You'd curse them and their guitars. Them and those half words. Them and those complaisant anti-romantic attitudes. You'd curse them for those suspended atmospheres, for those cloying refrains right now when your defensive barriers are so low. For those seductively suggestive and forbidden tones. Because each piece is sweeter than the last. Because they managed to make an album that multiplies the thick, sickly honey of 'Darklands' a hundredfold. Because they drowned the dirty and engaging rock'n'roll of 'Automatic' and 'Honey's Dead' in a pool of lukewarm and inviting water like this, emerging naked and defenseless. And you hate them, as you hate yourself, already golden, still in love with him, with his flaws, with your messes, with your imperfect story. And you hate them because with that rock'n'roll they too drowned a languid and beautiful end. Stoned and angry, eager and unreasonably unsure. In love and crazy. Dead and reborn.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
03 Sometimes Always (02:32)
I gave you all I had
I gave you good and bad
I gave but you just threw it back
I won't get on my knees
Don't make me do that please
I've been away but now I'm back
Don't be too sure of that
What makes you sure of that
You went away you can't come back
I walked away from you
I hurt you through and through
Aw honey give me one more chance
Aw you're a lucky son
Lucky son of a gun
You went away, you went away
You went away but now youre back
I got down on my knees
And then I begged you please
I always knew you'd take me back
05 Between Us (02:59)
Been a lot between us
And I guess there's more to come
We've been doing something right
But sometimes it goes wrong
We've been through places
And we won't be back again
We've been through faces
But I guess that never ends
I don't know what's goin on
Have we done something wrong
I've been strange I've been too strange
I've been to somewhere else and
I've been too strange
How come you saw right through my head
How come you saw inside my head
How come you know what's in my head
Been a lot between us
And I guess there's more to come
We've been doing something right
But sometimes it goes wrong
We were never scared of light
But the shadows that it throws
Are digging deep inside of us
And I think we're full of holes
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