It's been 18 years since Scotland's greatest band released new music. Since then the Reid brothers have fallen out, then back in so many times they could give the Gallagher’s a run for their money, accept that they're Scottish so they didn't make such a show about it as the fame hungry Oasis brothers. According to Jim Reid, the band have had an albums worth of material for a number of years, that it's only now that the brothers could agree that it was good enough to be released, culminating in Amputation, the first single from the new album, entitled Damage and Joy.
More than any other band, a single from Jesus and Mary Chain is the perfect taste of the album to come, mainly because each of their albums is made up of 11 to 13 versions of the one idea, so Amputation can tell us a lot about Damage and Joy. What it tells us is that the Reid brothers haven't changed a bit. The song might frustrate fans that wanted a bold new direction from the band (that group is small, believe me), but, like me, most fans will just be happy to have them back. The first part of the bands career took place between the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, but they could never be properly categorized into a particular mood or scene, they just made the music they wanted, knowing that trends and movements where things that happened to other people.
That's the case with Amputation: despite being a huge influence on the indie scene for decades, no one really sounds like the Jesus and Mary Chain accept them. Sure, Amputation may not be anything new from the band: it has the requisite distorted guitars, nihilist lyrics that sound both deep and hilariously shallow, and Jim Reid crooning like he know his leather jacket is the best, so why would we want anything different?
