Primal Scream
Xtrmntr (2000)

review by: Chris Orcutt
Date: 10/10/00

One of my favorite albums of the early 90s was "Screamadelica" by Primal Scream. It anticipated a lot of the electronic music to come and simply had some great, trippy, groovy songs. The stuff of theirs I heard after that album was beyond awful, so I stopped paying attention to them. But I had heard some pretty good things about their new album "XTRMNTR" so, for the first time in I don't know how long, I took the plunge and shelled out $18 and picked it up.

It rocks! Money well spent. Apparently people in England (where these guys are from) hail this as a masterpiece (I think the English are as desperate as the rest of us for the Next Big Thing), and while I wouldn't go that far, it is really good. The best songs on it are a great mix of in-your-face rock & roll (like The Stooges and Sonic Youth) and electronica (along the lines of The Chemical Brothers). The first four songs knocked me out, though #4, "Swastika Eyes" suffers a little from the fact that the singer thinks he's got a great line in "swastika eyes" so he says it every chance he gets. The bass player (from the Stone Roses) really drives everything, especially "Shoot Speed/Kill Light" which is a balls-out, adrenalized rock & roll drag race. There's a tune very that's reminiscent of "Screamadelica" - "Keep Your Dreams" which is as sweet as it sounds, and a few mediocre songs like "Insect Royalty" and a jazz-fusion thing called "Blood Money" who the hell wants to hear jazz-fusion on a Primal Scream record? And I have to say there's one all-out disaster entitled "Pills". It's a pathetic attempt at rap that sounds totally ineffective and silly. Incidentally, there's a parental advisory sticker on the cover because of this song: the word 'fuck' is repeated like 20 times in a row for no good reason.

But don't let that discourage you from picking this up. These guys are trying new things and combining seemingly disparate types of music together, and it's working. In a weird way this album reminds me of some of the Waterboys' stuff, not because of the music, but because when these guys are good they're really good, and when they're bad it's only because they're trying too hard.