Jim Reid may be in typically misanthropic, curmudgeonly mode – his disconcertingly polysyllabic introduction, “Hello; blah, blah, blah; how are you doing?” is about as engaged as he gets throughout – although The Jesus and Mary Chain are, dare I say it, back ‘on song’ so to speak. Playing the Roundhouse as part of Mogwai’s 20th anniversary celebrations, a preliminary set – one that’s now about as predictable as the regularised, ensuing Psychocandy segment – probably lasts for almost as long as an entire Jesus and Mary Chain show would have when Stuart Braithwaite first caught them in the act at the tender age of fourteen. “The first band [he] ever saw at the Barrowlands,” by which point “their drummer had a hi-hat [and] they were playing for a while,” tonight is not about Mogwai; they’ve “hand-picked” what is, by Braithwaite’s own admission, a “pretty spectacular” series. Their work, having already rampaged through two nights here in NW1 themselves, is done therefore; it’s for Reid et alii to now pick up where they left off with the aural ruination, and whatnot…
Thus with earplugs at the ready, and drummer Brian Young on a kit that boasts all sorts of (at least proverbial) bells and whistles, their blistering introductory bit comprises the brilliant din that is Head On, as well as Psychocandy (the recording; not the record, needless to say) and Some Candy Talking – as close as the band ever came to (as onetime drummer Bobby Gillespie puts it,) ‘the perfect combination of The Shangri-Las and Einstürzende Neubauten’. But the success of Psychocandy (the record; not the recording, needless to say) came from the brothers Reid’s blending the saccharinity of so many so-called ‘Spectropop’ assemblages, and the releases thereof, together with the ‘creatively aggressive’ vigour of their post-industrial German counterparts. Of course, to say that, say, the ineffably abrasive Taste the Floor shares in any real commonality with Tabula Rasa would be to miss the mark rather dramatically; just as The Jesus and Mary Chain incidentally did just last year, in London, at the Troxy.
But if Blues from a Gun has bite to its bark tonight, then henceforth, it’s every-shot-a-coconut kinda stuff: from the hypnagogic oozing of Just Like Honey, to the gorgeous wooziness of The Hardest Walk; the lugubrious, bruised Cut Dead, to the languid, delightful Sowing Seeds, Psychocandy sounds as fecund a creation as it has done in years, if not decades now. Obviously, Sowing Seeds sounds an unabashed rehash of Just Like Honey, which in turn witnessed then-drummer Gillespie pilfer from Hal Blaine and his Be My Baby thuddery, but nobody ba(u)ts an eyelid; instead, as visuals capable of making a nasolacrimal duct cry itself dry scream across the screen beyond, The Jesus and Mary Chain reclaim their mythic hypnotism. Reid divulges effusive “thanks for coming” come the closing moments, although in what really is a real turn of fortune, the Scotsmen are indubitably due our deepest gratitude once again…