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Artist:
  The Jesus and Mary Chain  
         
 
Brendan:
 

In 2011 my Minions spent time reviewing the entire catalogs by a few bands that were doing reunion shows: Archers of Loaf and Superchunk. Well, 2012 brings us a new band doing a reunion tour: The Jesus and Mary Chain. So I set my minions to listen to and re-evaluate their catalog prior to the show in September. PostLibyan leads things off.

 
         
 
PostLibyan:
 

I am sort of spearheading this review effort, and i want to do it in a non-chronological order. Or, perhaps, in an order that follows an alternate chronology. What i mean is that i am going to review the records in the order that i heard them.

You see, JAMC started off in Scotland in 1984, playing shows and releasing singles. Then they released an album, a few more EPs, and then finally an album that had made it to suburban Atlanta. Darklands was the very first thing i or any of my teenage peers had ever heard from this band. Everything that came before was mythical half-heard rumor. I know that some of you reading this don't understand how that could be, but in the days before the Internet, it was really hard to find out things about bands, especially bands from remote exotic locations, like Scotland. I couldn't just go and listen to samples, or download their singles -- i had to search out physical objects, and all of the JAMCs releases prior to Darklands were unavailable in Cobb County, GA.

So i started there, with Darklands, and then followed the band for several years. They changed, a lot, over the years, going through a few distinct phases. They started off doing fuzzy pop music, but eventually morphed into a guitar rock band doing big, pompous stadium music. I lost touch with the band in the mid 1990s, but at Brendan's behest am going back and catching up with those release i have missed.

Because JAMC went through phases, there are sections of their catalog that might not appeal to fans of other eras of the band. That makes it harder to review them, but we will persevere.

Here are the reviews, in the order that we mean for you to read them. You can, of course, choose to read them in order of release if you would like, and that is why we have but the release year beside each album. Each will be hyperlinked as the review becomes avaialble.

Darklands (1987)
Barbed Wire Kisses (1988)
Automatic (1989)
Psychocandy (1985)
Honey's Dead (1992)
Stoned and Dethroned (1994)
Munki (1998)

 
         
 
PostLibyan:
 

And here are some general links to info about the band:
   http://thejesusandmarychain.co.uk/    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jesus_and_Mary_Chain    http://jamcofficial.tumblr.com/    http://www.last.fm/music/The+Jesus+and+Mary+Chain    http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Jesus-And-Mary-Chain/
   http://www.myspace.com/thejesusampmarychain
Fan site: http://aprilskies.amniisia.com/

 
         

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