Honey’s Dead

It’s a lie that the Jesus & Mary Chain were merely rock classicists. They’ve often interfaced with what’s going on around them, either critically — Psychocandy seemed a spit in the eye to the ‘entryist’ chart pop that surrounded them in the mid-’80s — or enthusiastically, as when their love of hip-hop informed 1989’s Automatic. It’s no surprise that Honey’s Dead bears some relationship with dance music, then; the beats on “Reverence” are precision-tooled, but they’re topped with some of the Mary Chain’s most piercing, unrelenting feedback and noise since their debut album. Elsewhere, it’s business as, mostly, usual: grinding, three-chord rock as metaphor for sin (“Teenage Lust”); tenderness concealed by provocation (“Almost Gold”); love as pain killer (“Good For My Soul”). All this, and “Tumbledown” samples Einstürzende Neubauten, a salute from one gang of noise-busters to another.