It’s unlikely, however, that we’d be so conditioned to the use of distortion as a musical instrument in and of itself without Psychocandy while their peers were coating their songs with a wash of synthesizers, Jim and William Reid took traditionally “ugly” guitar tones and layered them over old-school rock and pop song structures. After two and a half decades of shoegaze acts and other denizens of fuzz re-appropriating its formula and taking it to higher levels, the influential first LP by The Jesus and Mary Chain hardly sounds as abrasive or as unusual as it once did. Listening to Psychocandy today, it’s possible that the record’s aural impact has somewhat faded.
It’s not really as much a departure as it was made out to be on its release: bursts of feedback still rule the day from time to time, and single “Blues From a Gun” is about as aggressive as anything that came from them before. Luckily, the results of the new electronic approach were more New Order than New Wave it’s less a step toward the mainstream than a different method of showcasing their rock and pop songwriting sensibilities. Recorded by Jim and William mostly on their own, it sounds almost naked in comparison to the two previous LPs. The majority of the percussion on the record is handled by a drum machine synthesizers replace much of the bass guitar. By the time they got to their third full-length, Automatic, they’d clearly had a change of heart. When the Reid brothers first embraced the abrasive guitar tones of Psychocandy and their early singles, they were doing it in part to get away from the cold, detached feeling inherent in much of the synth-pop being put out by a lot of their peers.
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