Primal Scream remain out of competition’s range

After years of experimentation, Primal Scream are in the phase of consolidation. That’s the best way to summarise ‘Evil Heat’, an ace album that embraces the whole gamut where Bobby Gillespie and his rock reprobates have felt the most comfortable. And, that’s where the fun lies, in rounding up all different sonic interests that have occupied their attention at any given time, including ‘Screamadelica’ (1991) and ‘Give Out But Don’t Give Up’ (1994).

These 11 songs – lasting miserly 40 minutes but then, Gillespie still thinks in vinyl terms – correspond to different Primal periods that afford the unusual diversity. The last album, ‘Xtrmntr’, was much more focused, it had unified sound and charted the chaste terrain. Here, we go from the single ‘Miss Lucifer’ (only charting at 25 – shame on you!), that’s bridging to the last opus, to the disturbingly warped lament that closes the album, ‘Space Blues #2’, via several detours.

The opening ‘Deep Hit Of Morning Sun’ announces landing inside a giant psychedelic landscape that pulsates like an illegally induced vision; the sonic fury is evoked on a pair of tracks that arrive together like a Molotov cocktail – punky ‘City’ and electro-bluesy ‘Skull X’ – but it is ‘Rise’ (a wise renaming of ‘Bomb The Pentagon’, not to freak out the already paranoid Americans) that totally logs into the ‘exterminating’ mode. ‘Autobahn 66’ is inspired by Kraftwerk that equally sounds like the German meisters of lingering creativity and a cyber-refugee; ‘Detroit’, as one might suspect, is a homage to The Stooges and a damn fine one too.

‘A Scanner Darkly’ is an instrumental that ticks like a finely crafted 7-series ‘Beemer’… There are a couple of guests, Robert Plant playing harmonica on the Stones-que ‘The Lord Is My Shotgun’ and the Croydon-belle-cum-supermodel, Kate Moss, Gillespie duets with on reworking of Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazlewood’s kitsch-classic ‘Some Velvet Morning’.

‘Evil Heat’ is a summation of Primal Scream’s oeuvre with Gillespie’s usual themes of politics, opiates, conspiracies, Nazis, well – the evils he’s been observing around for a while – an array of aches, issues and disgust. It all certainly keeps the Primals well above and beyond the common musical expression of the contemporaries.

The Primals may not be so young anymore but remain ultra vital and, if at first ‘Evil Heat’ doesn’t knock you down as the quiet paranoia of ‘Vanishing Point’ or the claustrophobia of ‘Xtrmntr’ did, it will quickly find its way under your skin, immunise whole system. ‘Evil Heat’ is a serum against the contagion that passes for popular music!

8/10