DAVE SEGAL: To best appreciate the nuclear-bomb-like impact of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy, you needed to hear it upon release during 1985 pop/rock’s gaudy malaise. (Better yet, you should’ve heard JAMC’s urgent, caustic 1984 debut single, “Upside Down.”) But failing that happy accident of birth, you should put the album’s emergence in the context of the era’s landscape, dominated as it was by MTV faves like Bruce Springsteen, Duran Duran, Don Henley, Tears for Fears, and Thompson Twins. Then along came these sullen, brutish Scots, sneaking wild-honeyed, Beach Boys–like melodies into the sort of noise tsunamis that made the Velvet Underground’s “I Heard Her Call My Name” seem placid. Psychocandy was the enema rock direly needed in the middle of the Reagan dynasty. Brothers William and Jim Reid proved that paint-peeling cacophony could coexist with super-sweet tunes in a rock context, and even get major-label backing while doing so (Blanco y Negro was a UK subsidiary of WEA Records Ltd.). There was nothing quite like it in that decade—or in any previous one, for that matter.
EMILY NOKES: DON’T TELL ME WHEN TO BE BORN, DAVE SEGAL. Just kidding, I know you’re just trying to help me not be an idiot, but I have to respectfully disagree: While there may have been nothing like it in 1985, there has been much like it since, and…
