Primal Scream LANDMARK: Screamadelica by: Ed Butler Mon:12-May-08 Label: Creation Year: 1991 WB rating 61 out of 100

The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses had been taking their cues from the burgeoning UK club culture for some time when Primal Scream released Screamadelica in 1991. They had been bringing rock closer and closer to the divide between the stage and the dancefloor, inspired by the post-punk Kraftwerk and Joy Division albums of the early 1980s. Screamadelica tore that barrier down.

Prior to this release, Primal Scream had been a middling pop-rock outfit with clear Rolling Stones overtones, and hadn’t really shown any signs of rising above the morass of UK bands fighting for recognition when so many groundbreaking acts were breaking through across the Atlantic. In 1989, they had cut a self-titled record which was received as poorly by fans as it was by the press, NME labeling it “confused and lacking in cohesion”.

However, the booming Madchester scene, fuelled by tabs of E at the Hacienda, and the growing acid house movement sweeping the UK led to the band asking DJ Andrew Weatherall to remix their track ‘Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have’ from Primal Scream. The result was ‘Loaded’. Weatherall stripped away everything but the bass and piano, swamped it in dub and threw in a Peter Fonda sample from The Wild Angels – “We wanna get loaded…we wanna have a good time” – and it was the sound of the rulebook being thrown out the window.

‘Loaded’ was a phenomenon. It reached number 16 on the UK charts and was the zenith of a movement which had been building for a decade. Coupled with the gospel-infused house of ‘Come Together’, a “new day” had indeed dawned, the musical landscaped redefined overnight. Those two tracks formed the backbone of Primal Scream’s entry into psychedelia; however, this was never anything short of a compilation record. Even the song that most recalls more vintage Primal Scream, opener, ‘Moving On Up’, with its Rolling Stones-do-gospel leanings, bears Weatherall’s Tito Puente-inspired Latin-style bongo-driven rhythms, which were de rigueur among rave fashionistas at the time.

One of the highlights of the album, ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’, is in no way a Primal Scream song, but is a dancefloor track through and through. Once, perhaps, it existed in a previous form as a Primal Scream number, but after Weatherall and co-conspirator Terry Farley had their way with it, added vocals from Denise Miller, and dubbed it into insensibility, it was a DJ number, no more, no less. Other producers included Hypnotone, who turned the 13th Floor Elevators’ ‘Slip Inside This House’ into a Happy Monday’s-inflected, bass-heavy thumper. Bobby Gillespie’s vocals even channel Shaun Ryder’s raspy howl. Meanwhile, The Orb takes mixing table duties on ‘Higher Than the Sun’, taking what would undoubtedly have been an moderately somnambulant Primal Scream dirge, giving it an extra-terrestrial dub treatment and once again robbing it of any of the actual band’s input.

But should the collaborative nature of the album detract from its quality? Of course not. Dance music, over its short lifetime has been defined by the fluid nature of its composers. That Primal Scream continues to gain kudos for such a groundbreaking release remains nothing short of criminal, but being an influential recording is no guarantee of quality or longevity. Screamadelica, like almost every one of its progenitors, and its antecedents, has aged poorly. Dance music, and dance musicians, have overwhelmingly struggled to create something lasting, timeless and permanent. The ephemeral nature of the dance scene permeates Screamadelica, the rudimentary beats and production pale in comparison with dance luminaries of today.

It is perhaps unfortunate that last year LCD Soundsystem released Sound of Silver, one of the preeminent dance-rock albums of all time, a mantle it wears due to its creators’ awareness of the need to look backwards as much as forwards, to rely on solid songwriting as much as catchy beats. While Screamadelica was indeed revolutionary, it remains a product of 1991, the year of 2 Unlimited, Londonbeat and C&C Music Factory. A year of long-forgotten dance numbers. It was, however, also the year of Nevermind, Loveless, Bandwagonesque, Blue Lines and Foxbase Alpha, albums that remain essential, revered, mimicked and entirely listenable, as fresh today as when they were written.

Screamadelica does not. ‘Loaded’ is a one-idea track that is stretched well beyond its use-by date, clocking in at over seven minutes when five would probably do. ‘Come Together’, at over ten, needs to provide more than it does, but at the time, dance music reveled in its lengthiness; the ability to fill a dance floor for a quarter hour was the ultimate goal, rather than creating a genuinely lasting experience.

So while Screamadelica deserves its place atop the pantheon of influential watermarks in the history of modern music, and will rightfully be remembered as the true genesis of the dance-rock movement that bred Daft Punk and their ilk, there is a distinct absence of anything that will thrill the 2008 heart as it once did in 1991. So while it’s almost certain that had Primal Scream not handballed the production to a who’s-who of the DJ fraternity they would have made an inferior product, they deserve neither credit for creating a landmark album, nor derision for creating one that has failed to stand the test of time.