The Jesus and Mary Chain: Stoned & Dethroned : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

What's a band to do after one of its songs is used in a Budweiser commercial? Quiet down, from all indications. To the uninitiated, Stoned and Dethroned might sound at first like The Jesus and Mary Chain Unplugged. Mention the band to most fans, and they'll tell you about the walls, not of sound, exactly, but of layer upon layer of feedback and distortion. But the band has had a serious Beach Boys fixation since Day One, shown most baldly in early songs like "Kill Surf City" and a tortured cover of "Surfin' USA." While the group's lyrics have primarily centered on death, Jesus, drugs, murder, sex, Jesus, sadomasochism, drugs, death – it's only lately, mostly on import CDs, that they've married the deadbeat lyrics to the endless-summer melodies and jettisoned the feedback. Now, after nursing along a generation of industrial bands and indulging a brief fling with techno beats on Honey's Dead (the most obvious example, "Sugar Ray," was a Budweiser theme song), the JMC have gone '90s and returned to more classic songwriting.

While the band's earlier albums are marked by sometimes rampant egoism and self-obsession (William and Jim Reid wrote, produced and performed all of their own stuff with drum machines or token band members), on Stoned and Dethroned they've not only hired a full-time drummer (Steve Monti) but have actually allowed cameos (ex-Pogue Shane MacGowan sings on the blurry, end-of-my-rope "God Help Me," and Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval trades lines with Jim Reid on the on-again, off-again "Sometimes Always"). Most of the chord progressions are familiar – not derivative but pleasantly expected, almost archetypal, most obviously on "Hole." Their power seems to come from their inevitability.

Take the feedback away from their earlier material and you have boppy pop songs with twisted lyrics – which is just what you'll find here, along with a few lush world-on-my-shoulder ballads like "Never Saw It Coming." The lyrics are pretty simple and dumb – just like the Beach Boys, when you think about it – and that's exactly why they're so cool. When it comes to writing candy-coated pop songs for sex-death-and-Jesus-obsessed would-be junkies, nobody touches the Chain.