"Some Candy Talking"

The Jesus and Mary Chain - "Some Candy Talking: (1986)

So this is why shoegaze exists. I think I get it a little bit better now.



In Scotland there lived two brothers, William and Jim Reid, who had always wanted to start a band. The like The Stooges, and the Sex Pistols, but they also liked the Beach Boys and The Shagri-Las. When they finally formed a real band it was the early 80s, and music was either punk, or keyboard pop, but they wanted to be different. They wanted to play guitars but they wanted to have tight harmonies and fun melodies. On stage they were known for inciting violence, and yet their records were known for having beautiful songs. More than that though, they added feedback and other noise to the tracks so that they sounded different. They wanted to be different. Their brand of music eventually was dubbed 'Noise Pop' and it was that combined layers of guitars and vocals and sound that eventually gave way to the more avant-garde of shoegaze which was all about the sound layers and kind of forgot about the tight melodies.

This track has strings helping to fill out an already big sound of ringing guitars and drums. All of the sound, but most noticeably the vocals, sound like they were recorded about halfway down a well and have a echo/ringing sound. The whole band never really sounds like they are close to us, no matter how loud they get it seems like the center of the sound is just out of reach and we are just getting the sound a little later.