Jesus and Mary Chain - Munki

By the time the Jesus and Mary Chain's sixth album came out in 1998, the band was definitely on a downward trajectory.  The album came off as a slightly desperate attempt to try as many styles as possible to make them relevant.  Opener I Love Rock 'n' Roll rocks fairly hard without fully convincing.  There are plenty of middling rockers such as Birthday, Stardust Remedy, Fizzy.  On Moe Tucker neither Jim nor William Reid bothered their arse to sing it so they got their bored sister to sing!

Unfortunately after this things go a bit pear-shaped with the trip-hop duet between Hope Sandoval and William Reid, Perfume, which probably should have been kept for a B-side.  Degenerate borrows liberally from the Stooges' TV Eye.  Cracking Up represents a distinct improvement, and is arguably the strongest track here.  Wasted ballad Never Understood (ooh clever!) is elegantly lazy.  But having SEVENTEEN tracks here is way, way too much.  By the time you reach closing track I Hate Rock 'n' Roll (yes, the snotty sibling of the opening track) you can see what they mean.  You'll have had to negotiate 7 minutes of the warped sounding Commercial and the pseudo sixties mysticism of Supertramp to get there.  Probably one of the Jesus and Mary Chain's less essential albums.