"I DON'T know if anyone has done feedback piano before," says The Magnetic Fields' ever experimental front man Stephin Merritt, proudly introducing his arch ambition to "sound more like Jesus and Mary Chain than Jesus and Mary Chain".

More specifically, after the "self-consciously soft rock" of 2004's I, the grouchy New Yorker has used and abused the industrial drone, Sixties girl-group doomed romance and honeyed surf pop of the Reid brothers' 1985 debut, Psychocandy, as the template for his war of sound.

Chamber-pop guitar, cello, accordion and piano are refracted through reverb, a tornado of feedback into which Merritt's curmudgeonly baritone rides with the candy-voiced Shirley Simms as his sonic sidecar companion.

Noise annoys, as The Buzzcocks once observed so succinctly, and yet Distortion's ominous bubblegum blitz is too melodic for Merritt's picaresque, blackly comic sexual dramas to grate.

Merritt is not the first to revisit Pyschocandy's fuzzy fusion of The Ronettes, Phil Spector and The Velvet Underground. The Primitives, The Darling Buds, and Dean & Britta from Luna have passed this way before, painting it black with their narcoleptic pop-noir, and now The Raveonettes' retro Danish duo of Sune Wagner and Sharin Foo can't resist a third crack at perfecting their Chain reaction.

A skeletal Fifties guitar twang and echoing, clattering drums course through the twitching veins of lustful yet languorous lullabies, wherein the dark dangers of a David Lynch movie always lurk around the corner.