Indie rock thrives on contradictions and the fusing together of conflicting sounds that strive so far away from each other that the distance draws them even closer. The juxtapositions of music and chaos is what pushes Indie rock further and further. Many bands have tried but achieving balance between dissonance and melody is an impossible feat and results in a devastating double-negative, being too obscure and noisy or playing music that is too poppy and accessible.
Noise as always been the secret fascination of everyone who has ever picked up a guitar. Stuck within the squeals of feedback and swells of volume of standard guitar noise is almost a sublime sensation that only the truly skilled can break out. Naturally, these sounds began to flow throughout music as guitarists just could not resist their urges to noise-out, but once again balance was essential.
Jimi Hendrix, The Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth truly defined noise within rock music and presented to the world the true artistic capacities of the unconventional and the noisy. The noise took the music somewhere else, into a divine state of unison, the guitar the player and the electrical domination amplifier were all one united in a world of destruction and peace. This destruction, as chaotic as it may have been at times with Sonic Youth or Hendrix performing 30 minute noise jams and literally killing their guitars could ultimately be tamed as the cleaner, calmer more concise noise pop bands began to emerge during the Eighties and Nineties.
The defining Album of the noise pop sound is, without any confusion The Jesus and Marry Chain’s Psychocandy. Instead of exploring around within blues and psychedelic like Hendrix or the Avant Garde like Sonic Youth and The Velvet Underground, the Jesus and Mary Chain found their niche in 60’s surf pop and used it to contradict the noisy squeals of dirty guitars and pushed poweramp tubes.
Pyschocandy achieves the unattainable balance on so many levels and every single track confuses the listener and leaves them in limbo between infectious pop harmonies, melodies and hooks and guitar death. This balance is heard on every song as the band adds the noise to the dynamic without blinding over the hook and the overall melody of the arrangemnt. Tracks like, “Taste of Cindy”, “You Trip me Up”, “Never Understand” and the haunting “Inside of Me” just barely restrain themselves from being full blown dissonance and are saved by the brevity and the ability of the band to never let the squeals be too overbearing. It is impossible to listen to Psychocandy and not be humming along to the tracks for weeks thanks to the bubblegum songwriting of the brothers Reid. Hooks appear out of nowhere in the sea of noise of crunching proto-punk songs like “My Little Underground” and “The living End”. Noise pop may seam like demeaning label to apply to Psychocandy as the album is chalk full of so much pop that it often makes it easy to ignore the noise. That is the great appeal of the album and why it spawned so many variants that tried to balance noise with pop like Shoegaze and dream pop.
Pyshcocandy achieves perfect balance; unity between the sugar-sweet pop sensibilities and chaotic, uncontrollable guitar feedback and makes them sound one in the same. Both elements rely exclusively on one another in order to compose the fuzzy, daze-pop that makes up Pyschocandy. Without either element the listener would ultimately left unfulfilled, as it is these contradictions are what defines indie rock. Jesus and Mary Chain on Psychocandy made noise pop sound natural; almost as if it were created by accident, in wake of a growing fascination with the Beach Boys and Hencrix. It is hard to say whether or not is a defining album n the vast history of rock music, but one thing is for sure it defined the balance of the contradiction in music.
