Primal Scream

It wasn't enough for Bobby Gillespie to be remembered as the man who'd manned the drums on one of the most influential records of the Eighties, Psychocandy by the Jesus & Mary Chain, the album that ferried British pop-rock from the dark lands of new wave to the swirling, chaotic shores of shoegaze psychedelia. After that experience with the terrible Reid brothers, Gillespie decided to steer his own band, Primal Scream (named after the psychologist Arthur Janov's book of the same title), which he'd been playing around Glasgow with since 1982, in a new direction.

To begin with, Bobby put out "Sonic Flower Groove" in 1987, followed in 1989 - after guitarist Jim Beatty's departure and his replacement by the brilliant Andrew Innes - by the self-titled "Primal Scream". Both records still sound somewhat unformed, but they stand out for their carefree way of blending sixties melodies, rigorously British and coated in melancholy psychedelic dust, with the most genuine rock fury, clearly indebted to the Stones. The turning-point year for Primal Scream, though, was 1991.

In early-Nineties Britain there were the romantic, desperate shoegazers, so called because they played hunched over their instruments staring at their shoes, as if trying to close themselves off, to isolate themselves in order to shield their own intimacy from the ferocity of the world outside. But early-Nineties Britain also had "mad" Manchester, nicknamed Madchester for this very reason, with its crowded clubs - like the legendary Hacienda - where kids went to have fun, dancing and getting wasted to the rhythm of long nights out between acid house, pop-rock and dreamy psychedelic digressions. "Screamadelica" fits perfectly into this context: with shoegaze psychedelia it shares the urge to experiment, to move beyond traditional pop-rock, treating the recording studio as a creative tool, crucial not just in giving the band a particular sound but in giving the album its stylistic and conceptual cohesion. As for Madchester music, the songs on "Screamadelica" end up as its "bastard" cousins, because the intent to upend hard, pure rock is the same; the heresy of the orgy between pop, black music, psych-rock, house and electronics is identical, even if the atmosphere breathed on "Screamadelica" is grimier and more disreputable (perhaps a legacy of Gillespie and Innes's less-than-angelic personalities, but also of the psychedelic lesson of the Sixties).

The revolutionary element of "Screamadelica" is sensuality. Never before had rock been so sensual, because never before had it stripped bare in the face of the voluptuousness of dance music, often regarded by bass-drums-guitars purists as absolute evil. Ultimately, Primal Scream - who nonetheless descended from a lineage running from the Beatles (for the melodies) to the Velvet Underground (for the unhealthy atmospheres), passing through the sacred fury of the Stones and Stooges - had the courage to lead rock back to its feminine beauty, to that ambiguous allure, to that subtle sensibility so often stifled by the more austere forms rock music has taken throughout its history.

So, even before being a musical revolution, the one carried out by "Screamadelica" is a cultural revolution, one that shakes to its foundations that obtuse, preconceived notion of keeping different spheres separate, even though they aren't irreconcilable. Primal Scream proved that you can start out in basements and end up in discotheques, that you can feed on rock and live on dance music, that you can be tough, dirty and mean even while shaking your ass.

So if it's to be an orgy, let it be an orgy: house highs, gospel choirs, dub effects, blues passion, psychedelic hypnosis, electronic effects, sampling; all piled together with the utmost joy and drunken pleasure. But also with great technical skill: a record - a great record - is always the fruit of collaboration between different parties, each one decisive and essential, who by human will or sheer chance found themselves sharing a project. We can't fail to mention Alan McGee, the enlightened Creation Records boss who deserves credit for believing in Gillespie and co., and Andrew Weatherall, the studio genius who produced many of the album's tracks (the other credited producers are Hugo Nicolson, the Orb and Jimmy Miller).

One of the tracks Weatherall worked on is the monster single "Loaded", the result of studio work with Innes on the track "I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have" from the previous album. From that track Weatherall extracted the bass and piano lines, combined them with a percussion loop taken from a remix of "What I Am" by Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, and added a sample of Gillespie's voice singing Robert Johnson's "Terraplane Blues". At the start of the track, meanwhile, another voice can be heard: it's Peter Fonda's, from Roger Corman's film "The Wild Angels"! But don't think of it as an abstract collage - everything is musically slotted together to perfection, so much so that the track can be considered the "You Can't Always Get What You Want" of the Nineties. Blues-rock roots are still strong on the opening track, "Movin' On Up", with frenzied percussion chasing manic piano chords and gospel choirs surging behind devilish guitar solos: here we're facing a reincarnation of "Sympathy For The Devil". And so, following the parallel, the splendid "Damaged" can only be their "Shine A Light", magic touched by the extraordinariness of small things: voice, guitar, piano, brushed drums and tears in the eyes.

The other knockout single is "Come Together". The joyous organ that opens it announces, after the acid-soaked bucolic fantasy of "Inner Flight", the resumption of the party: you can go back to dancing, dreaming, falling in love, screwing to energetic piano counterpoints interwoven with hallucinogenic polyrhythms straight out of a psychedelic trance.

But there are darker moments too: the muffled pulse of "Slip Inside This House", which updates the 13th Floor Elevators' psychedelic raga for the house generation of the turn of the millennium, and the two versions of "Higher Than The Sun": the first is a cybernetic trip-hop that seems to foreshadow the band's future developments and their other masterpiece "XTRMNTR"; the second is, as the subtitle states, a dub symphony in two parts, featuring the legendary Jah Wobble on bass. The dancefloors, for their part, keep getting worked up by the electro-soul orgasm of "Don't Fight It, Feel It", elevated by Denise Johnson's wonderful vocal performance, while "I'm Comin' Down" and "Shine Like Stars" are psychedelic sweets with a languid melody.

As already mentioned, the Primal Scream saga was by no means over with "Screamadelica" - in fact, new revolutions were just around the corner with "Vanishing Point" in 1997, the aforementioned "XTRMNTR" in 2000, and "Evil Heat" in 2002: the Primal Scream will keep claiming victims among rock fans who, after prostrating themselves before the sparkling housedelic vitality of these eleven tracks, will bow once again before the techno-punk explosions of "Swastika Eyes", "Accelerator" and "Miss Lucifer".

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16/10/2010