REVIEW: Jesus & Mary Chain, Stoned and Dethroned
- Tim Mohr
Influential and original bands often follow career paths like fireworks, particularly in Britain where tastes are notoriously fickle in the independent music scene. Bands break and disappear at alarmingly close intervals. Of course, in many cases this correlates to a lack of growth, whereby the records lose their importance due to monotony.
Given these expectations, it is even more remarkable that the Jesus & Mary Chain have delivered one of the year's best albums ten years after they stormed the British music scene with their feedback drenched pop. Stoned and Dethroned, their fifth album (excluding two B-side compilations), sees the band stripping down to largely acoustic arrangements, 17 succinct songs dotted with 12-string guitars and tamborines. Far from an enervated unplugged session, the record retains the band's self-proclaimed "sound of speed." The customary Jesus & Mary Chain feel of heat and speed, the lumbering hotrod on a deserted road, is openly cultivated with the over- exposed shots of highways, seventies cars, and band members that decorate the sleeve.
Accustomed to bludgeoning their listeners with electric guitars and a sheet of white noise, the Jesus & Mary Chain have perhaps taken a lesson from Ride, who punched holes in their wall of sound for parts of their third record,_Going Blank Again, and found their songs stood fine even without the enormous noise facade. The Jesus & Mary Chain have gone further, completely jettisoning their trademark electric guitar wheezes for gentle arrangements. The result, sonically, is extremely rewarding: the power and menace and confusion signified by the noise on past albums eminates even more effectively from the thread-bare songs.
Never the strongest lyricists, even this department has improved. In the opener, "Dirty Water," Jim Reid slyly questions the gangster ethos so prevalent in rock and rap these days: "Fuck with me and I'll fuck with you/ Isn't that what I'm supposed to do/Kick me down and I will kick you too/Isn't that what I'm supposed to do..."
The third track (and first single), "Sometimes Always," uses Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star in a mournful duet. Sandoval's plaintive drawl blends well with Jim Reid's lazy snarling slurs. Sandoval sings "I gave you good and bad/I gave you all I had/I gave but you just threw it back." Then Reid pleads "I won't get on my knees/Don't make me do that please/I went away but now I'm back." The exchange progresses uninterrupted by excessive guitar bravado or needless musical sidetracks. William Reid propels the melody with understated but purposeful guitars, a blend of acoustic and electric sounds.
The album remains consistent without blending together. Each song features distinct hooks and textures, so that 17 songs flow by without any tediousness. Themes of reconciliation over confrontation, forgiveness over retaliation, and a sort of humanism seem to inform the album, both lyrically and musically. In "Sometimes Always" Reid's character does finally get down on his knees in order to appease Sandoval. And rather than crank their sound up to Ministry-esque levels and try to one-up the current crop of amp torturers in a macho game of escalation, the Jesus & Mary Chain have stepped from the fray and written an album of pop songs that don't have to howl for attention.
The album title may constitute an admission by the Reid brothers that they can no longer compete with the noise-mongers of the 90s. Still, their abdication may be unwarranted as the fromerly-obscured beauty of their songs becomes more transparent. The Reid brothers seem even to have surprised themselves with the success of this low-amplification sound in proving their song-writing skills: the last of three b-sides accompanying the lead single is a re-recording of an old Jesus & Mary Chain title, "drop," using the milder instrumentation that characterizes Stoned and Dethroned.
A far more satisfying record than the latest offerings from a slew of younger hipsters,_Stoned and Dethroned shows that originality is not limited to the trailblazing first record by each new hopeful in the independent scene. Perhaps the album title is not self-depricating at all; perhaps it describes the younger bands who have enjoyed sudden rises during the long tenure of the Jesus & Mary Chain.
