The 1990s in 10 Albums: Screamadelica (1991)
Don’t fight it. Feel it.
In the previous entry, I noted how the beginning of the 1990s felt like an interregnum, which is unsurprising, because the 90s were basically a collection of post-credits scenes for the 20th Century in any case.
On those grounds, Primal Scream might be the ultimate 90s band. Their discography has never made any kind of sense in terms of logical progression — the album before and the album after is kind of a Rolling Stones knockoff. As for Screamadelica itself, its roots begin in 1989, with that prior album’s “I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have”, and ends all the way in 1992 with the Mercury Prize win. The album was a whole era, from the tail-end of acid house to the tail-end of rave.
It was and is also, however, eleven songs on a disc, and with curious sequencing at that. The first seven tracks, whilst varying in tempo, are relentless in tone, pretty much being the album cover set to music — all early nineties keyboard, gospel choirs and drum machine thuds. There’s then two slow ballads, which have never been Primal Scream’s speciality, a dub reprise of “Higher Than The Sun”, and then another slow ballad.
Slow ballads are not really Primal Scream’s thing, as other albums will attest. “Damaged” is fine enough, but “Shine Like Stars” is a weak closer and “I’m Coming Down” does little with its six minutes other than fill space. The question of whether or not Screamadelica is a classic is therefore one of whether a classic album has to be faultless, or merely contain a sufficient amount of excellent.
If the latter, then, sure, this album’s a classic. It dates itself, but thoroughly enough to preserve the moment in amber. It’s lengthy (almost 65 minutes) but tracks like “Loaded” and “Come Together” don’t really feel indulgent, not least because they have an unstoppable momentum to them (in the end, “Loaded” just gets stopped with its opening sample).
In the end, Screamadelica, classic or not, proved not to really be the beginning of anything. Primal Scream themselves never followed it up with anything similar, and by the time the album afterwards came about, it was 1997, making the slower, dub-influenced Vanishing Point a much more obvious approach.
Another oddity is the manner this album came about: six producers, usually more than one on each track, and notable divergences in style where the producer changes (Jimmy Miller takes the more conventional tracks “Movin’ on Up” and “Damaged”; The Orb produces “Higher Than The Sun”, Andrew Weatherall and Hugo Nicholson co-produce much of the remainder). In that respect, it’s produced much more like a hip-hop album than a rock one (where the producer is more involved in details, creative ideas and the process of mixing and controlling sound) or an electronic one (where the artist/band is the producer).
Yet no-one in Primal Scream is a rapper, so this is very odd indeed. It’s not that the band’s untalented, either — the aforementioned Vanishing Point, or the two albums afterwards, would be perfectly good entries in this series (although said latter two came out in 2000 and 2002). Screamadelica is a very fine album indeed, but despite being sorta-self-titled, it doesn’t entirely appear to be their very fine album. How odd.
