Classic Album Review: Primal Scream - Xtrmntr (2000)

Craig Stephen is back, revisiting another Primal Scream classic:

Listening to this, some time after revisiting Primal Scream’s debut album, Sonic Flower Groove - reviewed here - provides a deft swipe to the senses.

It doesn’t so much sound like a band at an advanced stage of their career; it sounds like a completely different act.

But then we should have expected nothing less: the Primals do mutating extremely well - from Byrdsian melodies to garage rock’n’roll to demented electronica. They’ve never stood still and have always possessed a determination to adapt and thrive. 

If there was an inclination that Xtrmntr was a step into a new world, we were given due warning from the cover, which was full of militaristic overtones and the title was limited to consonants stuck in caps lock mode.

The year 2020 may be the year of Covid-19. And it may also be a time of Brexit, anger, out-of-control neoliberalism and environmental destruction, but it isn’t to say that 2000 was a life of riley - the Y2K doom-laden dystopia, the peak of Blairism, the threat of a second President Bush, and even before the end of the first month had concluded there were ethnic riots in Egypt and two major air crashes.

Into this world of manageable mayhem came Primal Scream’s sixth studio album which mangled Suicide with Can. Bobby Gillespie has since dismissed suggestions that it is political, and yet it is hard to agree with the Glaswegian with lyrics such as: “Gun metal skies/ Broken eyes/ Claustrophobic concrete/ English high-rise/ Exterminate the underclass/ Exterminate the telepaths/ No civil disobedience/ No civil disobedience/” or, these from the visibly confrontational ‘Swastika Eyes’: “Your soul don’t burn/ You dark the sun you/ Rain down fire on everyone/ Scabs, police, government thieves.” Hardly easy listening.

The adversarial tone kicks off before the music even starts, with a few terse words of dialogue heralding the opening track ‘Kill All Hippies’. The lines are cribbed from the obscure 1980 arthouse film, Out of the Blue, in which a punk-obsessed woman rips loose with a rant that that made her choice in lifestyle and attitude rather transparent: “Destroy/ Kill all hippies/ Anarchy/ Disco sucks/ Subvert normality.”

Xtrmntr’s ambition is apparent from the superstars of indie and dance who were enticed to join the party: Bernard Sumner, Kevin Shields, Adrian Sherwood, David Holmes and the Chemical Brothers. Those influences would be magnified in an album that set to achieve so much, and largely achieved it.

A standout track, ‘Accelerator’ is magnificently vicious, using an orchestra of guitars to create a detached and dangerous three-and-a-half minutes of punk rock’n’roll. It’s a sonic manifestation of Gillespie et al’s preferred poison of the time, amphetamines. The fireball middle part recalls My Bloody Valentine’s ‘You Made Me Realise’ - and who is a part of this art vandalism but Kevin Shields of MBV.

‘Swastika Eyes’ - incredibly, the first single lifted from the album - could be perceived as a barbed attack against Nazism and the various forms of odious right-wing, flag-waving boneheaded politics of groups like the British National Party which was gaining credence in parts of England at the time. But it is ostensibly a directive against all-powerful corporations and corrupt governments, aka “A military industrial illusion of democracy.” Powerful words, and just as powerful was a grinding bass and a hypnotic, demonic riff that was let loose in full, ragged glory for the final two minutes.

Slowing it down, albeit marginally, ‘Blood Money’ is a full-throttle instrumental that has elements of a Roy Budd gangster soundtrack fused with the theme tune to a BBC2 televisual feast on drug-running in Margate.

And on it goes, with further adventures in sonic attacks: ‘MBV Arkestra’ adopts the Vanishing Point funk workout of ‘If They Move Kill ‘Em’ and, as the title indicates, Kevin Shields mutilates it into a hurricane of Indian psychedelia, Neu!, and deranged wah-wah guitars till it resembles a thunderous, earache-inducing volley of noise and melody.

Xtrmntr sings off with ‘Shoot Speed/Kill Light’ whereby the lyrics are stripped to nothing more than the title repeated ad nauseum powered by Bernard Sumner’s savage guitar-playing. The New Order frontman wouldn’t sound this deranged till the opening bars of ‘Crystal’ some five years later.

Primal Scream would continue the electro-clash experimentation on 2002’s Evil Heat, which contained a track entitled ‘Rise’, which had been heard on the tour to promote Xtrmntr as ‘Bomb The Pentagon’. But of course, it was never going to get a release under that title post-9/11.

Album Review: Murmur Tooth - A Fault in This Machine (2020)

Well … this is a genuine grower. A slow burning album release from mid-March which I’ve been absorbing during lockdown and (now) beyond …

Murmur Tooth is Leah Hinton, a Berlin-based New Zealand musician, and although there were a couple of earlier Murmur Tooth releases (EPs) dating back to 2016, A Fault in This Machine is Hinton’s first full-length solo outing.

It feels a little genre-less. In fact, it is impossible to impose any sort of accurate label on it. Something that lazy reviewers (like yours truly) tend to rely on being able to do. Which means I’ve found myself returning to it more often than I otherwise might have, with repeated attempts to fully grasp it. Which has ultimately resulted in me falling a little more in love with it each time. 

I'm tempted to stick the “intimate chamber pop” tag on it. Even though it is more than that, and not really that at all. So it is probably easier to tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t a rock album. It never gets loud. Which is surprising when you consider Hinton’s former life as a rock guitarist in a couple of touring “metal” bands. And it isn’t even a pop album in any conventional sense.

It’s way more challenging than any of that. All of these tunes - nine of them, nearly 32 minutes’ worth - feel intensely personal. Deep, heartfelt, and intimate. A bit gloomy, even. With Hinton baring her soul over the top of meticulously crafted pieces of music, incorporating guitar, piano/keys, what appears to be cello, and all manner of delicate instrumentation. With a sprinkling of fairy dust added to the production. She draws the listener in so close, with clever, and often self-deprecating lyrics, that it is almost impossible not feel like a reluctant voyeur (at times).

In fact, that is exactly what it is … it’s the most uneasy listening “easy listening” album you’re likely to hear all year.

Highlights: the title track, which opens the album, plus ‘Weak Knees’, ‘Rain Rain’, ‘Slip Away’, ‘Early Train’, and ‘Memory’. But there’s not really any filler. 

Leah Hinton: “I wrote, recorded, produced and mixed the album in my little apartment in Berlin. I've spent the last few years upskilling myself as a ‘DIY fullstack musician’ - it's amazing what you can teach yourself these days. All the songs and music videos are 100% DIY and are a testament to perseverance, YouTube tutorials, and good friends who like to help. This album is all my lost and all my love laid out in hertz and decibels, and has been my sense of purpose through a time adrift. I hope you like it.”

You can buy A Fault in This Machine here.

Album Review: Antipole - Perspectives II (2020)

Antipole’s Perspectives II was released in early April, just a few weeks after the entire planet was forced into an unprecedented lockdown period thanks to the perils of Covid-19, and as the title would suggest, it’s a sister release to Perspectives (2018). 

But where Perspectives revisited and reconfigured Antipole work from the Northern Flux album (2017), Perspectives II offers up remix takes on the band’s 2019 album, Radial Glare. Well, more or less - there’s a couple of exceptions: ten of the eleven tracks from the source album feature, while a couple of additional tracks dig deeper into the band’s archives.

What is most important in all of this is that Perspectives II hits the same giddy high watermark established by all of the aforementioned releases, and like Radial Glare itself, its an intoxicating journey into melodic, hypnotic coldwave.

If I’ve been mildly critical of Antipole’s past work on account of it being a little too retro or derivative - see comparisons to Joy Division, The Cure, et al - or at least skirting around the periphery of such, one of the main benefits of these makeover releases or remix projects is the range of styles on offer. Some tunes are even darker than the source track, while others are more geared for the dancefloor. And all are less one dimensional than the originals simply because that’s the nature of remixes - multiple sets of eyes and ears are tasked with reconfiguring the material.

In the case of Perspectives II, extra gloss is lovingly added by the likes of ACTORS, Adam Tristar, Crying Vessel, European Ghost, The Coventry, and People Theatre, amongst others.

The ACTORS remix of ‘Decade Apart’ (below), which opens the album, is shaping up to be one of my favourite tracks of the year, while People Theatre’s crystalline synth transformation of ‘1983’ is surely attracting the attentions of darkwave club DJs everywhere.

Paris Alexander’s deft production hand was all over the original album, and it remains a feature here. Of the two non-Radial Glare tracks, Alexander adds some standalone love to ‘Please Let Me Sleep’, featuring Eirene, which harks back to Northern Flux, although I’m less sure about the origins of ‘Coral Joy’ (Caidas Libres Remix), which I suspect might actually be older than anything else found on Perspectives II.

Strongly recommended for fans of post-punk, darkwave, coldwave, shoegaze, synthpop, and everything else in between.

You can grab a copy of the album from Antipole’s Bandcamp page here.

Album Review: David Bowie - ChangesNowBowie (2020)

In November 1996, as he prepared for his 50th birthday celebration show at New York’s Madison Square Garden, David Bowie recorded a handful of rehearsal tracks for a radio special called ChangesNowBowie. That show, and those recordings, circulated in bootleg form for many years but were, in April 2020, set for an official Record Store Day release on a newly sanctioned (or official) album with the same title as the radio show itself.

That plan, of course, hit a snag when RSD was postponed in wake of the Covid-19 global pandemic outbreak which has pretty much brought the entire planet to a standstill. That 
setback didn’t prevent ChangesNowBowie being released in digital format (only) however, with a more extensive release (including vinyl, CD) earmarked for the rescheduled RSD date of June 20.

Unlike the three previous ‘Changes’ offerings - ChangesOne (1976), ChangesTwo (1981), and the 1990 hybrid compilation, erm, Changes - ChangesNow isn’t really a “Greatest Hits” type set. But it does include a few gems. Nine quite special tracks, and something of a pick n mix assortment of mostly stripped back acoustic takes on (again, mostly) older 1970s material.

For the ChangesNow sessions Bowie was supported by revered guitarist Reeves Gabrels (Tin Machine, The Cure*), bassist and co-vocalist Gail Ann Dorsey, and keys man, Mark Plati, but rather typically, the minimalist nature of these versions means its all about the man himself, and that incredible voice.

The radio interview itself and the general chit-chat narrative of the original broadcast has been omitted from the album, naturally. If you want that, you’ll just have to dig deep for the aforementioned bootleg editions. 

Highlights include fantastic takes on standards like ‘The Man Who Sold The World’, ‘Aladdin Sane’, and the live/cover favourite ‘White Light/White Heat’, which is easily the most uptempo, or straight up rock track of the bunch. There’s also the Hunky Dory sleeper, ‘Andy Warhol’, Ziggy’s ‘Lady Stardust’, and the Lodger-era ‘Repetition’. But for me, the pick of the bunch is Tin Machine’s ‘Shopping For Girls’, which is given new life on this. 

All up, it’s a cool addition to the wider Bowie discography. I’ve got the digital version of the album, which does quite nicely for now, but completists will want this on vinyl, so don’t sleep on RSD’s June 20 release date. 

* Incidentally, Bowie’s 50th birthday bash at Madison Square Garden was pivotal in Reeves Gabrels eventually joining The Cure. It was there, in early 1997, where Gabrels met Robert Smith, who performed a track alongside Bowie at MSG, with the pair going on to forge a close friendship. Years later, in 2012, Gabrels guested with The Cure for a few festival shows before later becoming a permanent member of the band. He remains a member of The Cure at the time of writing.

Classic Album Review: Kraftwerk – Minimum-Maximum (2005)

The death last month of Kraftwerk’s founding member Florian Schneider prompted an outpouring of love and respect for the phenomenal achievements of the pioneering German electronic act.

Kraftwerk has been a constant source of inspiration in my own little world of music consumerism across more than 40 years, but where does any newcomer start when it comes to discovering the music of Kraftwerk?

Well, the lazy way, and certainly the most cost effective way of doing it, is to start right here, with Minimum-Maximum, because virtually all of Kraftwerk’s key tracks are to be found in one form or another on Minimum-Maximum.

But that, of course, would be to deny yourself the pleasure of experiencing fine studio albums like Autobahn, The Man Machine, and Computer World. So while I’m about to strongly recommend Minimum-Maximum as a first-class example of Kraftwerk at its best, I also feel compelled to point out that nobody (and certainly no newbie) will totally “get” Kraftwerk purely on the strength of listening to one live compilation album, albeit a double album set. So do yourself a favour, you know what needs to be done, and the three aforementioned albums are all ideal tasters.

Kraftwerk’s musical influence can be seen everywhere – they are to electronic music what Microsoft and Windows ’95 were to operating systems, yet these four geeky German blokes somehow managed to anticipate the technological age way back when Bill Gates was still just a goggle-eyed naval-gazing schoolboy wearing oversized shorts. If Kraftwerk’s music was futuristic in the mid-to-late Seventies and throughout the Eighties (and it was), it has lost little of its impact thanks to all of the advances in technology that have taken place since … and hey, there’s been a few.

Consequently, it might be said that Kraftwerk as a “live” act has never sounded better than it has in recent years, even better perhaps than it did in its so-called prime – and what better way to test that theory than to pack up the laptops, processors, and synthesizers and take them on the road, on a world tour no less? ... something that ultimately led to the Grammy Award-winning Minimum-Maximum, a 22-track live extravaganza recorded in 2004 at a variety of venues across the globe (see London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco, Berlin, and several other less exotic locations).

It is, to cut a very long story short, a superb album; a live document and a Greatest Hits rolled into one, by one of the most important “bands” of all-time. Yes, all-time. I can’t really say much more than that.

Note – the album comes in two versions – English and German.

Ten Essential Kraftwerk tracks found on Minimum-Maximum: ‘Tour de France’, ‘Autobahn’, ‘The Model’, ‘Neon Lights’, ‘Radioactivity’, ‘Trans Europe Express’, ‘Computer World’, ‘Pocket Calculator’, ‘The Robots’, and ‘Aéro Dynamik’.