Psychocandy : Expanded Edition ［2CD+DVD］

Q - Ranked #88 in Q's "100 Greatest British Albums" - "...Mixes the Velvets, Iggy Pop, The Ramones, and Phil Spector to produce a morbid drill of a record....A fan letter to the darkest US rock...[it] is a bridge between 2 great British inventions, goth and punk..." Alternative Press - Ranked #10 in AP's list of the 'Top 99 Of '85-'95' - "...JAMC's debut LP radically updated the Velvets, Beach Boys and Ramones, dousing honeyed melodies with scouring blankets of feedback....Fantastic tunes under tons of feedback..." Alternative Press - Included in AP's "10 Essential '80s Albums". Q - Included in Q's "50 Heaviest Albums of All Time". Spin - Ranked #45 in Spin's "50 Most Essential Punk Records" - "...These diffidently tuneful jokers declared noise, timbre, and texture the new coins of the realm..." NME - Ranked #27 in NME's list of the 'Greatest Albums Of All Time.' NME - Ranked #6 in NME's list of The 50 Greatest Albums Of The '80s - "...[PSYCHOCANDY drenches] the sweetest pop tunes in the most hideous racket..." CMJ - "...haunting and unique songs...[whose] radiance is buried under an impenetrable blanket of piercing white noise..." Q - 5 stars out of 5 -- "[The album] still feels seismic....The Mary Chain brought and extremity of intent and emotion that was unprecedented." Rolling Stone - 4.5 stars out of 5 -- "[B]oth catchy and terrifying, sounding like the Beach Boys had let out their inner Charles Manson." Mojo - 5 stars out of 5 -- "Twenty-one years later, PSYCHOCANDY still has grime under its nails, an irresistible feedback urchin raised by rock'n'roll wolves." Spin - "[With] bubblegum hooks...blasts of guitar noise...[and] buried mumbling singing...this is the root integer of shoegaze." Spin - "[With] sticky-sweet, hang-ten Beach Boys hooks...[and] a dense pudding of Velvets-via-Joy Division feedback and distortion on top..." Record Collector - 5 stars out of 5 -- "[A] brash statement that guitars should be louder than vocals and that texture of sound was as important as the tunes embedded within."

Arguably Psychocandy is an album with one trick and one trick alone -- Beach Boys melodies meet Velvet Underground feedback and beats, all cranked up to ten and beyond, along with plenty of echo. However, what a trick it is. Following up on the promise of the earliest singles, the Jesus and Mary Chain with Psychocandy arguably created a movement without meaning to, one that itself caused echoes in everything from bliss-out shoegaze to snotty Britpop and back again. The best tracks were without question those singles, anti-pop yet pure pop at the same time: "Just Like Honey," starting off like the Ronettes heard in a canyon and weirdly beautiful with its bells, "You Trip Me Up" and its slinking sense of cool, and most especially "Never Understand." Storming down like a rumble of bricks wrapped in cotton candy and getting more and more frenetic at the end, when there's nothing but howls and screaming noise, it's one hell of a track. However, at least in terms of sheer sonic violence and mayhem, most of the other cuts were pretty hard to beat, as sprawling, amped-up messes like "The Living End" (which later inspired both a band and a movie title) and "In a Hole." "My Little Underground" is actually the secret gem on the album, with a great snarling guitar start, an almost easygoing melody and a great stuttering chorus -- not quite the Who but not quite anything else. What the Reids sing about -- entirely interchangeable combinations regarding girls, sex, drugs, speed, and boredom in more or less equal measure -- is nothing compared to the perfectly disaffected way those sentiments are delivered. Bobby Gillespie's "hit the drums and then hit them again" style makes Moe Tucker seem like Neil Peart, but arguably in terms of sheer economy he doesn't need to do any more. ~ Ned Raggett|