Classic Album Review: Primal Scream - Evil Heat (2002)

Craig Stephen enjoys a close encounter with the Devil’s music … 

Through their multitude of stylistic changes, Primal Scream have always retained a bit of a punkish, anti-establishment streak. 

This could be partly explained by the band’s mainstay, Bobby Gillespie, coming from good socialist stock: a great-grandfather was one of the founding members of the Independent Labour Party in Glasgow, and his father, also Bob, was a union leader and a Labour Party candidate in Glasgow (losing to the Scottish National Party when he was effectively a shoe-in). 

So the young Gillespie would’ve grown up surrounded by such lofty ideals. 

Consequently, the Primals have never quite fitted in with the record industry, such as their adoption of electronica about 1990, a hitherto verboten idea in the world of indie music. 

They upset the poor wee things of Rangers FC (1872-2012) by branding them “the most fucked up scum/ That was shat into creation” on a Scotland football single collaboration with rabble rouser Irvine Welsh and On-U Sound. Cue an orchestration of contrived outrage from the dark side of football. 

As the band matured they perversely became more difficult to label, a band that the record industry never quite came to terms with. 

Therefore, the band’s seventh album, Evil Heat, is a bizarre, bewildering and yet mesmerising album that veers between extremes. 

As examined in a previous review, the predecessor album XTRMNTR was a veritable axe thrown at the world. This extraordinary collection mangled Suicide with Can and contained Molotov cocktails in the likes of ‘Swastika Eyes’ (“Exterminate the underclass/ Exterminate the telepaths/ No civil disobedience”). 

A year after that album’s release, Primal Scream toured with a song called ‘Bomb the Pentagon’. A problem arose when someone did exactly that during the 9/11 attacks. Rather unsurprisingly, no song with that title has ever appeared on record.

Gillespie’s excuse that that was because it wasn’t a particularly good song falls flat through the appearance of ‘Rise’ on Evil Heat. This is a reworking of ‘Bomb the Pentagon’ with a new chorus and a few other lyrical tweaks, but the music was largely unchanged. 

It was a rallying call to the dispossessed and the desperate: rise up you bastards FFS, Gillespie was screaming at the masses. 

“Hey wage slave where's your profit share?/ They got ya down, they're gonna keep you there ... Get on up, protest riot/ Are you collateral damage or a legitimate target?” 

There are external talents at play throughout Evil Heat. My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields produces six tracks, half the album therefore; Two Lone Swordsmen (aka old hand Andy Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood) produce a further four tracks, and one more is cooked by the ubiquitous producer Jagz Kooner. And on the other side of the window helping out were a veritable array of British stars, such as Jim Reid, Robert Plant on harmonica, and Shields himself on guitar effects. 

One contribution that came as something of a surprise is supermodel Kate Moss playing Nancy Sinatra to Gillespie’s Lee Hazlewood on the duet of ‘Some Velvet Morning’. Moss hadn’t shown previous form in a recording studio, but perhaps that was the objective. 

This is a remarkably different version from the Sinatra/Hazlewood original: big crunchy beats shower Gillespie’s initial, lush vocals. Moss does a decent job of her portion of the lyrics, and gives a beauty to what is a down’n’dirty electroclash take on a song that Hazlewood says was inspired by Greek mythology. 

‘Skull X’ sees the band delve into its punk roots, and there’s an element of the Sex Pistols in the robustness, but they actually sound more like The Stranglers. Lyrically, it reeks once more of Gillespie’s sharp, dark mind: “The sky's black with locusts/ My eyes are burning stars/ There's a mountain of gold teeth/ in every bank vault in this world.” 

The Weatherall/ Tenniswood-produced ‘Autobahn ’66’ is reminiscent of Kraftwerk. It appears to be an instrumental, until we first hear Gillespie at 2.29, with what is mere background vocals limited to an oft-repeated verse of “Dreaming/ Dreaming/Seeing/Seeing/Dreaming” for a minute and a half till the singer develops the theme with an expansive chorus. 

Album opener ‘Deep Hit of Morning Sun’ is a rabbit punch to the senses: backwards guitars, a mystical vibe, barely any drums, and a ghostly chorus. It’s unlike virtually anything the band have done, and I would like to imagine it as being left off XTRMNTR, but that’s probably not the case. 

‘Miss Lucifer’, meanwhile, is reminiscent of The Prodigy with its punk-techno feel; ‘Detroit’ is hard and heavy electronica; and ‘A Scanner Darkly’ is an instrumental similar to anything off the second side of Bowie’s Low. 

Evil Heat is something of a seminal album which is underpinned by pulsating electronica. It has no balance, no theme, and it often bemuses. And that is why I like it. I had previously regarded Evil Heat as a weak follow to XTRMNTR but having played it several times over the past few days I’m discovering an awful lot more than I did on the irregular listens over the past 20 years. It has a cult feeling; not everyone is going to like it, but those who do shower it with glowing terms.

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.