* The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com
IAlm REVIEWo
A lmost immaculate
Monday, October 13, 2008 -9A
Scottish rockers revisit
the past with b-side-
packed box set
By DAVID WATNICK
Daily Music Editor
The Jesus and Mary Chain made more
than a few mistakes in their original 1984 to
1999 run. Drunken stage
infamy aside, their record- y
ing career never brought
them the acclaim they Th Jem
* deserved, especially in the
United States. Sequencing
the jarring "The Living Chain
End" after the luscious The Power
"Just Like Honey" to kick T
off their debut Psychocan- of Negative
dy would prove to be the Thinking:
first of many questionable B-Sides&
(but honest) decisions. But , Rarities
in attempting to fill the WEA/Rhino
band's history gaps, new
box set The Power of Nega-
tive Thinking: B-Sides E Rarities reveals just
how much the JAMC actually got right on
their first try.
Through81tracks across four discs, Power
merely confirms that Jim and William Reid
(the Mary Chain's leaders and only constant
members) failed to deviate from the prin-
ciples of Record Company 101; they always
saved their best material for proper albums.
Unlike some of their indie peers and follow-
ers, the Reids actuallyused b-sides for lesser
songs rather than hidden treasures.
So it follows, then, that the best cuts
here are the eight alternate versions of Psy-
chocandy tracks. The emotional purity in the
"Just Like Honey" demo and the danceabili-
ty of the soundtrack version of "The Hardest
Walk" effortlessly overshadow the historical
value of relics from the band's infancy like
the spacey, Magnetic Fields-predicting "Up
Too High" (the Mary Chain's first demo) and
the noisy but musically pedestrian "Upside
Down" (their first single).
As disc two of the set makes obvious, the
JAMC just about exhausted their cache in
recording the forgotten masterpiece, sopho-
more release Darklands. Other than retro-
melodic b-side "Happy Place," the only
Darklands-era finds on The Power as essen-
tial as the "Happy When it Rains" demo are
novelty numbers like "Kill Surf City," "Bo
Diddley is Jesus" and a cover of "Surfin'
USA."
And that's the holding pattern that runs
through the rest of the Mary Chain's albums
and their related tracks; the worthy songs
never got axed. But that doesn't make the
collection totally devoid of worthwhile nug-
gets. The spare, confessional 1989 b-side "I'm
Glad I Never" offers a vulnerable side that the
Reid's rarely revealed. At a relaxed 90-sec-
onds though, it certainly wasn't much of a
candidate for the spitfire tempo Automatic.
The Power features all of 1990's Roller-
coaster EP, and all four cuts pull their weight
- especially the noise-pop classic "Silver-
blade" and a thumping run-through of Leon-
ard Cohen's "Tower of Song." Yet it's really
no surprise that only theEP's radio-bent title
track (which heavily borrows the melody
of The Byrd's version of "Mr. Tambourine
Man") was tapped for inclusion on the sexy,
controversy-begging Honey's Dead.
It may come as a disappointment that, in
over four hours of music, The Power of Nega-
tive Thinking offers few to no tracks that
match the indispensability of the original
Mary Chain catalog. But in serving no true
duds, it speaks to the consistency and time-
lessness of the Reids' potent art. It accom-
plishes the important task of gathering
nearly all the odds n' sods of the JAMC's leg-
endary run in one place, and it's a welcome
addendum to a body of work which it could
never equal. But then again, almost nothing
else could either.
Nobody fucks with the Jesus.