Do you like the Ramones and the Velvet Underground?

Oh, do I!

Would you like it if the Shangri-Las recorded their pop hits with off-brand Japanese fuzz pedals?

Who wouldn’t? 

Do you want to listen to an album that’s central to shoegaze, goth, noise pop, and indie rock?

Take my $20 and mail it to me across the Atlantic Ocean because it’s the early 2000s and YouTube, Spotify, and Bandcamp don’t exist and the record stores near me don’t carry music this cool.

Here’s your CD of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s 1985 Psychocandy! Don’t you just love it!?

I think it hurts my ears.  

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In my wilder, woolier days, I had a (slightly older) roommate who chastised me for inviting too many friends over on work nights. 

“It’s not the guys who’re the problem,” she said. “It’s the girls. When they laugh, it cuts through the walls like a knife through butter. It’s that high-pitched cackle that goes straight to my eardrums.” 

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“It sounds like a moose mating call,” my friend Ben said when I introduced him to my new favorite album Psychocandy. We already liked “Just Like Honey,” because it was cool in Lost in Translation, but I thought the best way to pitch the band to my (slightly older) buddy would be the much shriek-ier “In a Hole.” 

He came around to their later more traditional sounding material, but never to Psychocandy. 

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On a recent Life of the Record podcast, the Jesus and Mary Chain’s braintrust, Scottish brothers Jim and William Reid, explained that in order to get their guitars to sound less like guitars and more like moose mating calls they used a heretofore untried combination of Gretsch semi-hollow body guitars, Fender Twin Reverb amps, and Shin-Ei 8-TR Fuzz Wah pedals. That’s an unforgiving amp, an unforgiving fuzz, and a guitar not well shielded to distortion. It’s like trying to play a powerline. As far as I know, no one has used that combination of equipment since. 

On Psychocandy, the Reids pioneered their own guitar sound. Fuck your Marshall stacks and Stevie Ray Vaughn approved Tubescreamers. Try out a Shin-Ei Fuzz. If you breathe on your guitar, it’ll hiss at you for the rest of the week. 

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I watched a Ramones documentary where, I believe it was Joey, talked about how he heard all sorts of other instruments – piano, horns, woodwinds – in Johnny guitar playing. Where others heard Johnny’s speedily down strummed barre chords as a slur of electric noise, Joey heard an orchestra. Ah, the magic of harmonic overtones. 

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Considering how important Psychocandy is to alternative music, it’s wild how few albums sound like it. As far as I know, in the realm of indie rock only Steve Albini for Big Black and the American shoegaze band Medicine embraced the album’s all treble/no bass guitar tone. (The Scandinavian black metal bands went wild for it, though.) 

Even the Reid brothers themselves ran from the sound, going more gothy for Darklands, more poppy Automatic, and, gasp, acoustic for Honey’s Dead. In recent years, they’ve let the fuzz creep back into their music, but it never sounds as harsh and uncontained as it does on Psychocandy. 

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Some innovations seem inevitable. Of course someone was going to invent the lightbulb. Whether it was Thomas Edison or Lewis Latimer (who invented the filament), someone was eventually going to put together the pieces necessary to allow for electric light. 

With that in mind, consider that Psychocandy’s collision of ‘60s pop with ‘80s noise was eventually going to happen. The Reids’ fusion seems so obvious and elemental: sugary pop songs that are so sharp and jagged that they hurt your teeth. 

But the Reids deserve all the credit in the world for making it happen. A good idea does not an album make, and they had to force their producers (they burned through three of them) and their record company to understand that they knew what they were doing. 

Luckily they were already half a decade into their band before they made it to the studio, so they had their vision…and their songs. 

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“Just Like Honey,” “Never Understand,” and “You Trip Me Up” don’t just work as barbed wire confections. Without all the hiss and fuzz, in the mouths of the Supremes or the Shangri-Las, they could’ve been actual hits. 

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The Reids eschewed any experimentation or jams to crank out a debut full of bangers. As they said in the podcast, they intended all fourteen of Psychocandy’s tracks to be a gateway into the band. When it came time to pick a single, they could’ve picked at random, because all of the album’s tracks slay. 

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Nineteen eighty-five has always struck me as a weak year in music. Don’t get me wrong; Tom Waits, Hüsker Dü, and Whitney Houston had career years, and the Replacements, Kate Bush, the Pogues, and the Cure released some of their best albums. But after that top class, the draft starts to thin out.

Psychocandy stands among the best of the year. It’s certainly the coolest album of the year. 

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But it’s more than that. In the lineage of alternative guitar rock, Psychocandy is one of the most load-bearing albums of the 1980s. . 

As punk ran out of steam in the early ‘80s (and morphed into the more rigid hardcore), the more whimsical drew inspiration from the 1960’s pop, releasing albums like The Soft Boys’ Underwater Moonlight, the dB’s Stands for Decibels, and Rain Parade’s Emergency Third Rail Power Trip. By 1985s, the underground’s fixation with 1960s pop began flagging. Psychocandy is the inevitable endpoint of that fixation. Retroism at its most perverse.

 Psychocandy is ground zero for shoegaze. Loud guitars, soft vocals – that’s the genre, that’s Psychocandy. 

Even though the Chain didn’t consider themselves goths, most goths could get behind Psychocandy. With its mumbled and coo’d vocals, mid-tempo-heavy songs, and romantic vision of love, how could a goth not love Psychocandy? Besides, look at the Reids on the cover. Look at their hair: jet black, visibly flammable. That’s goth hair. 

Finally, the Jesus and Mary Chain are a key progenitor to 1990’s American indie and hard rock. Their use and abuse of heavy distortion gave permission for grungers to leave their Big Muffs and Fuzz Faces on all the time, for Pixies to bash out songs shorter than three minutes, and for noise poppers like Tiger Trap, Black Tambourine, and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart to beef up their cutesy songs with eardrum-shredding noise. 

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Happy belated 40th birthday, Psychocandy! You still hurt my ears so good.