I'll be relieved when I get to Good Friday finally and can have some down time. If only a long weekend.I don't like to complain. I'm not working down a mine with the morning lift descent into drakness and a world of underground tunnels of darkness to navigate and sparse oxygen clogging up my lungs.
My work is from my flat these days. Teaching German business people in office spaces and flats and houses with virtual backdrops. The future's so bright you'd better wear shades. Anyhow, I've carved myself a window now between lessons. Time to listen to and consider the latest Jesus & Mary Chain record, Glasgow Eyes.
It's their eighth in all. In almost forty years. Hardly Stakhanovite productivity. You might almost call them lazy bones. Though I never got the impression that the Reid Brothers were siblings to rile or stir to irritation if you knew what was good for you.
Still they're back and that's a very good thing, because Glasgow Eyes.is a very good thing indeed. Hardly a reinvention of their wheel so much as a sleek new model assembled on the basis of the ones we've come to expect of them.
For the Reid's have always been classic songwriters and ones of the highest calibre. Who could have imagined it when they first came to public notice late ine 1984,. Blinking in the sunlight and scratching their acned complections and scrunching up their poor approximations of Ian McCulloch's more imperious and cared for quiff.
Plus ca Change. It's still Suicide meet Ramones meet the Velvets meet the Shangri-Las meet The Stooges at the Motorik End of Line Central Bahnhof. There's nothing essentially new sonically or lyrically on show here. Just variations on a theme they've carved out in leather and studs and shots of various kinds over forty glorious years of existence. But change is overrated if you've got a basic template as good as this which merely requires retweaking and reassembly every few years rather than a complete overhaul.
The Reid's are smart cookies and they've come up with the goods again. This is a record which compares with their very best and that's some achievement. There's wit and wisdom, top tunes and loads of priceless Glasgow attitude and grit. They've still got it.
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