Product Review

1989's Automatic is the third album from Glasgow alternative rock institution and was engineered by Alan Moulder. At this point in their career, J&MC was essentially a duo - brothers Jim and William Reid and a drum machine. The dark, twisted pop - sometimes soaked in feedback, sometimes pounded out with drum-machine backing - of Automatic contains their most successful single up to that point, Head On (later covered by the Pixies). Pitchfork wrote in 2006: ''Conventional wisdom wrongly calls this the dud. With the band reduced to the brothers only, things go artificial: the drum machine is foregrounded, the bass is played on keyboards, the feedback's on vacation. In that space, the Reids take their biggest shot at doing full-on pop, something that feels like a career peak''.