I didn’t even like Darklands the first time I heard it. I had previously fallen in love with The Jesus and Mary Chain on the strength of the piercing distortion permeating their 1985 debut Psychocandy—especially on that stunning opener “Just Like Honey“, what with the way they took the same drum riff from The Ronnettes’ 1963 “Be My Baby” that Billy Joel ripped off for “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” and somehow made it a million times cooler.

1987’s Darklands by contrast, what with its much cleaner guitars, poppier melodies, simpler arrangements, and how they replaced their human drummer with a bland drum-machine, sounded like a cowardly retreat, a deliberate watering down of their sound for commercial purposes, an abnegation of whatever made them unique in the first place. Even its slightly shorter runtime (35 clipped minutes verses a respectable 40; a bare-minimum 10 tracks vs a more full-throated 14) felt like a tepid withdrawal. It bummed me out, is what it did.

And yet over the years, I’ve found that though my respect for Psychocandy remains undiminished, Darklands is the one I have revisited the most. Partly that is simply because these are simply well-crafted Pop songs, ones that really do stand up to repeat listens, and it’s nice to be reminded sometimes that their distortion wasn’t a gimmick, that there really was solid songwriting chops underneath it all.

Then there is the wide variety of circumstances these particular songs have resonated in: the one-two punch of “Happy When It Rains” and “Nine Million Rainy Days” for example has hit the spot on more literal rainy days than I can count; similarly, on many a late-morning when it’s actually nice out, I have found myself reaching for “Deep One Perfect Morning” more often than not; and of course the rousing “April Skies” gets a whole bunch of play from me when I finally welcome back the Spring.

But part of it too is that I came to better appreciate those poppier melodies themselves, especially the band’s low-key chutzpah in making the title-track to an album called Darklands not brooding, not ominous, not spooky, but the most uplifting and hopeful number on the record–as a reminder that the proverbial leap of faith into the darkness isn’t into darkness at all, but into the light (even if “heaven I think is too close to hell…”). Like the Christmas lights we defiantly throw up in the lead up to the winter solstice, our approach to the Darklands is how we finally start turning back to the sun. (Side-note: having served my mission in Latin America, I adhere more to the 12 days of Christmas practice of concluding the season with Three Kings Day on January 6th; I find it helps with the post-Christmas Day malaise and disenchantment, at a bare minimum).

Speaking of Christmas: I admittedly threw “Fall” onto my annual Fall playlist at first, only to later recall that: 1) as true Scotsmen themselves, the members of The Jesus and Mary Chain would use the British word Autumn, never Fall, to describe the season; and 2) the song ends with the clear-cut line, “Everybody’s falling on me and I’m as dead as a Christmas tree,” at which point it promptly migrated over to my Christmas playlist.

The line is admittedly a bit of sixth-grade poetry; an example of what Voltaire meant when he said, “Anything too stupid to be said is sung.” But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to wonder whether that is such a bad thing. Every Modernist museum I’ve ever visited features some sort of Jackson Pollock or his innumerable knock-offs or some sort of “automatic-drawing”/scribbling intended to tap into a much more primal, elemental, childlike frame of mind—and I don’t say that dismissively but admiringly! Why then not for poetry, too? Why are we so ashamed of what cringe we got up to as children–the age at which we do not yet even have any concept of cringe–especially when we are all commanded to be as little children, for of such is the kingdom of God?

For even if we concede that the line has all the forced-pretentiousness of an adolescent, “I’m as dead as a Christmas tree” is still an evocative line in its own way: that feeling of being beautiful yet dead; of being beautiful because we’re dead; of being beautiful because we’re not only dead and soon to be cast off and forgotten, we rest assured that we will still rise again in all our glory at the rise of the next season, as Christ Himself will come again; to dress up a dead tree in honor of the Christ child, who became clothed in glory because He died for us; to take on similar glory, co-heirs with Christ, because we must all die as well–we cannot resurrect otherwise.

We cannot rise unless we first Fall. The new year cannot begin till the old when ends, just as you cannot put new wine into old bottles, just as old things must pass away so that all things can become new. Everything must end just as all things are eternal; indeed, such is how the covenant is both New and Everlasting. It is one of the many leaps of faith into the darkness we must take to turn back into the light.