Sister Vanilla is The Jesus And Mary Chain's Jim and William Reid, their little sister Linda, and Ben Lurie, also of the 'Chain. A concept conceived 10 years ago, this debut release - coinciding with The Jesus And Mary Chain reforming to play Coachella - is crammed with timeless, witty, fuzzy pop songs,
led by Linda's gorgeous vocals. With the distant, distorted guitars and layers of sound, the component sonic parts of this album are prominent, but whereas
The Jesus And Mary Chain tended to have a miserable feel about their output, songs such as the smart 'Down' (which post-modernly references 'Psychocandy' in its lyrics) and 'Can't Stop The Rock' have a less depressing lilt about them. Excellent stuff. [8/10]
TIM NEWBOUND
UNCUT - March 2007
Jim and William Reid reunite to support their sister.
The Jesus And Mary Chain may have just reformed for the forthcoming Coachella festival. Covertly though, Jim and William Reid have been working together for some time as part of their sister Linda's band. Little Pop Rock unambiguously revisits the Mary Chain sound and, on 'Jamcolas' and 'K To Be Lost', their fractious story.
Amid all the dirty, clanging glam, there are unfinished moments, but "What Goes Around", with Jim's filthy, bile-ridden lyrics ("I piss my lover, I pissed his wife") sung with relish by sis, is everything you'd hope for.
NICK HASTED
www.playlouder.com - 4th May, 2007
As the 2007 concert calendar has shown, any group of geezers can reunite if the price is right. But the Jesus and Mary Chain's Jim and William Reid and Ben Lurie are the only ones who can claim to be reuniting twice. However, if they did Coachella for the money, then their other recent venture - backing up the youngest Reid sibling, Linda, in Sister Vanilla - appears to be for the love. Or, at least, their participation suggests a token gesture of gratitude to the one person who can probably keep the two
brothers from kicking the shit out of each other.
Though Little Pop Rock is Sister Vanilla's first album, the lineup effectively formed on the Mary Chain's 1998 swan song Munki, on which Linda lent her pretty-vacant vocals to the revved-up Ramones pastiche "Mo Tucker", a sprightly performance that contrasted sharply with the femme-fatale cameos the band routinely farmed out to Hope Sandoval. Nine years later, this enthusiasm appears unabated on Little Pop Rock, on which Linda sings with the wide-eyed wonder of a fan girl who gets to front her favorite band: "Honey's Dead and Psychocandy, I listened to them all the time," she sings on "K to Be Lost", her sense of awe undiminished by the fact she's related to the guys who made them.
As it's genetically impossible for the Reid clan to sound like anything other than the Jesus and Mary Chain, it's no surprise that Little Pop Rock's acid-casual serenades - centered primarily on the symbiotic relationship between getting high and feeling low - could've featured on any Mary Chain album from Darklands onward. And that's a comment on both the songs' lack of deviation from the JAMC's Sunday-Morning-Velvets songbook, and the songs' consistent quality and unhurried charm.
But the steady, metronomic nature of rockers like "Jamcolas" (just like the title says: the JAMC gone pop) and the cheeky Let It Bleed tribute "Delicat" is undercut by a more free-spirited approach to the album's quieter moments, like the casually anarchic piano plinking that closes the opening "Pastel Blue", a gentle acoustic lullaby wherein Linda recounts a car crash caused by her zoning out to the Pastels. How appropriate then that Little Pop Rock comes full circle with "The Two of Us", a closing Stephen Pastel duet powered by an inviting Stereolab drone that provides the proverbial exclamation point to a mutually
beneficial family affair: The sister gets to live out her indie rock fantasy, while her brothers are given the opportunity to come back stoned and re-throned.
STUART BERMAN