#33third

Look at that! Our good friend and former contributor Paula Mejia has written the latest entry in the fantastic “33 1/3” series on classic albums: her book debut looks at the continued appeal and relevance of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s landmark noise pop debut Psychocandy from a modern perspective.

It’s published tomorrow (October, 20th) and you should check it out!

Paula’s music writing career peaked early with a wonderful OWOB entry on the Velvet Underground, but she just about made do in the meantime with writing gigs at places of lesser renown such as The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, or The New Yorker… 😉

If you’re in the neighbourhood of Washington D.C., Brooklyn, or Baltimore, you can catch Paula on her book tour over the coming days; more details here. Go and say hi (if you’re nice)!

You can find more information and purchase the book from Bloomsbury Publishing or at your trusted local bookseller and wherever books are sold. 

Here’s the official blurb:

The Jesus and Mary Chain's swooning debut Psychocandy seared through the underground and through the pop charts, shifting the role of noise within pop music forever. Post-punk and pro-confusion, Psychocandy became the sound of a generation poised on the brink of revolution, establishing Creation Records as a tastemaking entity in the process. The Scottish band's notorious live performances were both punishingly loud and riot-spurring, inevitably acting as socio-political commentary on tensions emergent in mid-1980s Britain. Through caustic clangs and feedback channeling the rage of the working-class who'd had enough, Psychocandy gestures toward the perverse pleasure in having your eardrums exploded and loudness as a politics within itself.

Yet Psychocandy's blackened candy heart center – calling out to phantoms Candy and Honey with an unsettling charm – makes it a pop album to the core, and not unlike the sugarcoated sounds the Ronettes became famous for in the 1960s. The Jesus and Mary Chain expertly carved out a place where depravity and sweetness entwined, emerging from the isolating underground of suburban Scotland grasping the distinct sound of a generation, apathetic and uncertain. The irresistible Psychocandy emerged as a clairvoyant account of struggle and sweetness that still causes us to grapple with pop music's relation to ourselves.

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