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Live Review
by SashaS
20-6-2002
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| Primal force of Bobby G |
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Live: Primal Scream
Shepherds Bush Empire, London
Wednesday, June 19, 2002
Primal Scream change musical style but remain the best in the land
Curlicues is the world one has to think when Primal Scream are onstage: the spine-grabbing rhythms are adorned with some very intricate guitar sounds, keyboards’ motifs and a vocal that explores distance, space and magic in a world that is too crammed with crap. Bobby Gillespie and the boys really rock you into another and rather unique realm.
Using blues and rock idioms, infusing them with electronica and cyber funkiness, the Primals live on another plateaux of awareness. It is the one that believes that this is not simply entertainment but also a weapon of expression and criticism. There is even a feeling that Bobby G so many times feels restricted by music’s basic quality of sheer entertainment. Thus, in his search for cyber-psychedelia or hypno-groove, G-man has never abandoned addressing the real issues.
First part of the show mainly contains new material, from the forthcoming album ‘Evil Heat’, in spite of fans being unfamiliar with it, the crowd’s response is generous. New songs are less aggro, more round-edged without actually losing any power; it is simply different take of it. It is more melodious, less confrontational but still as engagingly dancey as were the primal steps. This new approach to songs, like the first single ‘Miss Lucifer’, has also infiltrated the older material.
In place of intensity and paranoia of the ‘Xtrmntr’, ‘Swastika Eyes’ has become a club-track (Hacienda-period) that takes everyone into its sonic wonderworld and turns this venue into the most perspired place on the planet! The same treatment is applied to older cuts, such as ‘Rocks’, that effectively transforms it into a new composition. But, there is a dark side, the funereal blues sounding ‘The Lord is My Shotgun’, that easily can rival anything Tricky did on his debut album. They also premiered ‘Rise’ and ‘City’, a reworking of the David Holmes’s track ‘Sick City’.
Bobby, more energetic (certain dance moves are on display) and, probably, the happiest since ‘Screamadelica’, in his white jacket and shirt, with his hairs touching shoulders and as lean as a crossbar, is the prototype of a rockstar in the vein of Jagger, (George) Clinton, Rotten… He doesn’t talk much because he knows that all one-liners are just clichés and Gillespie’s always refused to deal with the banal. He commands our full attention from his inner sanctum; Jim Reid, formerly of Jesus And The Mary Chain, appears for an encore, a brand new song, ‘Detroit’ and remains for a cover of Johnny Thunders’s classic ‘Born To Lose’.
It all ends with a newie ‘Skull X’ and leaves us with our teeth exposed in a huge grin of satisfaction. Beats as phat as ancient columns mark the path to the rock-hybrid’s Parthenon. Tonight’s show, if you ever doubted, proved again that Primal Scream are the best live band in this land. Period.
SashaS
20-5-2004
Primal Scream’s album ‘Evil Heat’ is released 05 August on Columbia/Sony
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