The Jesus and Mary Chain: Honey's Dead : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

An appetite for self-destruction, any psych major can tell you, is a cry for attention. So when Jim Reid of the Jesus and Mary Chain wheezes: "I wanna die just like Jesus Christ.... I wanna die just like JFK.... I wanna die on a sunny day" – lines that kept "Reverence" (the first single from Honey's Dead) off British TV – he's obviously just jerking society's chain. And when he and brother William later run the same lyrics over a stretch of Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner," the song's death wish dissolves into self-mockery.

Seven years after inventing the genre, the pioneers of noise pop (three chords and a distortion pedal) are still building castles of fuzz in the same sandbox. Since firing off the landmark Psychocandy in 1985 – a velvety torpedo – the Chain hasn't added many links. The Reids seem content to recycle their elementary songs endlessly while others carry their sharp-edged toys off to new stylistic playgrounds.

But one brilliant idea is better than none, and the Reids work their terrain with indefatigable enthusiasm. Recovering from the ennui of Automatic (1989), Honey's Dead is looser, livelier fun: bites of irresistible nod-pop demagogy rhythmatized by a stuttering dance beat, barbecued in woolly guitar static and laden with echo. These Velvet Underground acolytes revel in their willful shallowness. Not only is "Teenage Lust" unromantic, it's not even sexy, yet "Little skinny girl she's doing it for the first time ... and it feels fine" wraps up blank-generation vacuity with blunt efficiency. Similarly, the infectious "Far Gone and Out" skewers media blitz with phrases like "television sick and television crazy."

On an unwavering mission to explore every corner of one divine inspiration, the Jesus and Mary Chain – and the redundant, essential Honey's Dead – serves as proof that monomaniacal dedication is one of rock & roll's most powerful gimmicks.