Surprisingly effective country-influenced duets from Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie and Savages’ Jehnny Beth on ‘Utopian Ashes’.
A skull-crushing onslaught of psych, krautrock, dub and post-punk enhanced by a small army of cutting edge producers, ‘XTRMNTR’ was Primal Scream’s second masterpiece.
While often overshadowed by ‘Screamadelica’ and ‘XTMNTR’, Primal Scream’s 1997 album ‘Vanishing Point’ was progressively fearsome and helped move the British guitar scene away from Britpop.
One of the very few dance records that isn’t tied to its era, ‘Screamadelica’s timelessness was cemented by how it doubled back on rock history, rearranging the past so it pointed to the future, and is arguably the most far-reaching piece of musical exploration in pop’s vast canon.
by Ed Biggs Given what has happened to so many of their contemporaries from the early ‘90s, who’ve either disappeared into complete irrelevance or are desperately coining it in re-touring their old albums, Primal Scream have become some of the hardiest survivors in music. Just when everybody has written them off as an irrelevant museum band, Bobby Gillespie, his trusty crew and an ingenious producer reinvent Primal Scream once more with
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by Ed Biggs Although it quickly earned itself a reputation as being one of the most outrageously loud guitar debuts in pop history, it’s impossible to understand the last 30 years of British rock without an appreciation of Psychocandy, the first album by The Jesus & Mary Chain. Before, ‘noise’ wasn’t really a distinct concept in pop music, simply a function of the volume at which guitars were played.
