The Jesus and Mary Chain - Damage and Joy (Album Review)

The Jesus and Mary Chain are a band that have managed to retain cult status. They are a band record store snobs all over the world cherish. Perhaps because, like most record store snobs, the Mary Chain are a band who revel in their thinly-concealed contempt for humanity. The key to their sound has been the delicate act of balancing that contempt, which has more often than not been turned inward, towards each other.

Damage and Joy is their first record in nearly twenty years and the dark brooding of their early work has not mellowed with time. Thank Christ for that. Their musical universe remains a gorgeously gloomy place to be; one where lush, airy melodies are offset by a decidedly Scottish ‘fuck this’. This is something that bands from the United Kingdom have always done so perfectly in ways their American counterparts cannot. It’s as if they realise that just because its gloomy doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be pretty.

As with all the bands that became building blocks for what would eventually be called shoe-gaze, there is a psychedelic element that gives everything they do a kind of dream-pop feel. One doesn’t listen to a Jesus and Mary Chain record, one kind of drifts through it uncertainly.

The stand out track, second single Always Sad is a blissfully melancholy duet. It embodies what it is that the Jesus and Mary Chain do; what they’ve always done. Song for a Secret, the track that follows Always Sad is perhaps less obvious in its reflective downfeel but its there nonetheless brightened by a hope that never seems to be realised.