My Top 1000 Songs #177: Taste Of Cindy

As noted previously, the Jesus and Mary Chain's 1985 debut Psychocandy was sheer revelation: Why isn't everyone taking infectious Beach Boys-styled pop songs and running them through the blender, buried amidst walls of gauzy reverb & distortion? (And soon enough, everyone would be.) And if album opener "Just Like Honey" announced the band's blueprint with a moody "In My Room"-type ballad, then "Taste of Cindy" was the counterpart, an upbeat "Little Honda" or "Catch a Wave" given the same treatment, only noisier, an assault of vacuum cleaners and dentist drills swathed in cotton.

And, yeah, most of the album's tracks fit the same bill (the band opted to release the similar "Never Understand" and a few other rockers as singles, but incongruously not "Cindy"). But it was "Cindy" that dug its claws in me first, and I can still hear those ah-ah-oh's from the chorus echoing in my head all these years later. It was the kind of song that immediately made me want every song to sound just like it. The song barely breaks the 90-second mark, but it gets the job done.

Need a break from the blistering sonic attack? Try the acoustic version!

Live, last year: