By all rights,
the Jesus and Mary Chain probably shouldn't be making albums in 2024 considering it marked their 40th very turbulent year making music. After all the drugs, the fights, albums that never reached the staggering heights of their best work, changing trends, and hits-filled concerts, even the band's biggest backer had to be doubtful that they would ever make a record that had the power, vitriol, and energy of their best work. Amazingly, painfully,
Glasgow Eyes is both a stunning reclamation of the soul of
JAMC and a batch of more traditional-sounding songs. It leans a touch more strongly towards the former, with many of the tracks digging deep into the band's ugly past of disagreements, fights, drug abuse, and desolation to pluck out songs that are as bleakly honest, darkly painted, and gnarly as anything they've done. To take two, "Venal Joy," which sports a brilliant vocal cameo from
Faye Fife of
Revillos/
Rezillos fame, and "jamcod" are lyrically unvarnished and sonically thrilling. They show the band expanding their reach to encompass synths, unspooling some very grungy guitars, and going far beyond the formulaic politeness of much of their latter work. Other songs exhibit traces of the avant-garde jazz the Reid brothers had recently been listening to. One can hear it in the off-rhythm guitar squiggles of the slow-motion ballad "Pure Poor," which wobbles and shakes like a giant piece of industrial machinery on its last legs, as well as the occasion fragments of piano on a few songs or the way
William Reid's guitar consistently tends to meander ghostlike around the edges of the melody. They also delve nicely into some clanky synth pop on "Silver Strings" and slip into peacefully drifting dream pop on the lengthy "Hey Lou Reid," which takes its time going nowhere as the guitars chime and stray synths buzz the mix. The band sound fully committed on this segment of the album, dedicated to taking their all-too-familiar sound somewhere more interesting and, importantly, more honest. The trademark
JAMC pop songs help to balance some of the darkness; "American Born" is a hooky snatch of Reid-style snark set to a good beat, and "Second of June" conjures up sepia-toned memories of
Stoned and Dethroned, only needing a
Hope Sandoval cameo to make it perfect. ~ Tim Sendra
![The Lonesome Crowded West [Bonus Track]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0767981144627_p0_v2_s90x140.jpg "The Lonesome Crowded West [Bonus Track]")
