- It’s been nearly twenty years since the last Jesus And Mary Chain album – Munki – and over thirty years since Psychocandy, their ground-breaking debut release which opened many ears and hearts to the beauty buried within the sound of feedback and fuzz.

Ironically, it took a tour to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of that release to not only bring the two Reid brothers -who have been the core of the band- back playing music together, but to make them realise they can now stand making music in the same room as each other – and sometimes even enjoy it! This certainly wasn’t always the case – a fact wryly reflected on the song Facing Up to the Facts, which includes the lyric “I hate my brother and he hates me/That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” one of many songs on the band’s new release Damage And Joy.

Despite the fact that it’s been a long time since the last album, around five of the fourteen tunes on this one have been released in different forms stretching back more than a decade, but not as The Jesus And Mary Chain. Now the band is using a producer for the first time – best known as Youth, the bass player from Killing Joke. He seems to have done a good job getting the Jesus And Mary Chain sound revived and replenished.

If you are familiar with the past work of Jesus and Mary Chain, there will be a lot that sounds familiar about the songs on Damage and Joy, which at times seem to be almost deliberately making sure there is a hat tip to all of the facets of the band’s sound as it evolved over their previous six albums.

Despite often being seen as one of the founders of the shoegaze genre, the band rejects that label – and even disputes whether it should be seen as a real genre. But regardless of the label, if you’re not familiar with the band’s music, but you like gloomy, reverb drenched guitar, some pounding rhythm and generally downbeat lyrics with some raindrops of dry humour, there’s a good chance you’ll like this.

The album features a variety female vocalists on a range of tracks, including Isobel Campbell from Belle & Sebastian, and also the Reid brother’s younger sister Linda. The female vocals tend to coincide with the album’s best songs – somehow a lyric like “you know we’re living in shit” seems more poignant when it’s a tuneful female voice delivering it.

While Damage and Joy is not a ground breaking leap forward for music, or even for the Jesus And Mary Chain itself, it could still fairly be described as a welcome return to form. For a band that's had virtually no form at all for the last twenty years, that's no bad thing.

- Andrew Bartlett.