The Jesus and Mary Chain "darklands"

There was a punk/goth girl in my high school that terrified and bewitched me.  It was the '80s and the punk rock look hadn't yet been co-opted by mall stores, in fact the only punk rockers in mainstream culture tended to be cartoonish street villains in action movies.  I was still very much a pop culture victim and it made her exotically gorgeous and dangerous.  I think I may have spoken a handful of words to her (she was a grade above and unequivocally out of my league).  She wore a #thejesusandmarychain shirt and I was intrigued by the name though it was years later in college when I first remember actually hearing the band.  I remember when I first heard them I thought they were wimpy in a Smiths way and I disregarded them.  I chalked it up to "it must be a hot punk rock girl thing", something I was not equipped to appreciate.  Years later, years after the whole shoegaze explosion they helped parent, I rediscovered the band. I heard a song at a local dive bar called The Pink Flamingo. It hit me harder than the cheap Canadian beer. I went to the local specialty record store Home Of The Hits soon after and combed their used cd bin for one of the band's discs. I remembered this album cover from that punk girl's shirt and bought it.  Upon revisiting I was surprised how loud the band actually were, not in a heavy metal bombast way but in a distorted speaker sheer volume way.  I quickly fell in love with their discography of blurry, distorted songs with sensual monotonous vocals.  Years later, way after the in tial fact, I fell in love with the shoegaze genre they helped spawn. But that's stories for other discs.