same

(Creation, 1989)

It dawned on me just today, when I was listening to a copy of Embrace’s “If you’ve never been” that I picked up in a thrift store in Soho out of pure curiosity, that the singers voice, Danny McNamara, sounds a lot like Bobby Gillespie on this record – recorded a dozen years before. Even some of the melodies and harmonies, e.g. on the song “If you’ve never been in love with anything” or “happiness will take you in the end” are almost like taken off from the self-titled record by Primal Scream. And then I realised how great this record really is. Years before all these bands like Travis, Coldplay or Embrace, Bobby Gillespie laid down a formula for a great rock-pop-record, filled with painfully emotional songs, rockers as well as ballads, that even today, about thirteen years later, sound as new and fresh as on the day I heard them first. Never minding the crackles and noises of my worn-down copy, I listened to the whole thing over and over again and I doing it right now as well.

Primal Scream are a band that has been re-inventing itself a lot. This record falls softly between the period of Mancunian flower-pop before and the rocket-like headstart into rave-pop right afterward, not at all thinking about the post-post-whatever (mainly their own history, I guess) cyber-electro-rock/pop of today. This record owes half to the Rolling Stones for its sheer rock-ness and relying heavily on simple guitar-riff, and the other half on John Lennon for defying all criticism and putting on the most sentimental, tear-drenching ballads I have heard in a long time. No, these new bands as mentioned above may be emotionally disturbed and sad all the time as well, but they are nowhere close to “you’re just dead skin to me” (aside: what a concept!) or “you’re just too dark to care” on this album. Moreover, this record is so stripped bare it is almost unbelievable. There are drums, two guitars – Les Pauls, of course – a singer and some piano on the slower tracks. The singers voice is left alone in the middle between a few minor and major chords and bittersweet-melodies, stark-naked and bared of all covers, which adds a lot to vulnerable atmosphere of the record. It is almost like listening to someone’s breakdown from a secret hiding point, because vulnerability and emotions like these, most people only allow themselves in the privacy of their own home. Well, that is what art makes and what makes art – exhibiting the clandestine, breaking socially accepted rules and showing what is usually hidden.

Of course, there is a big pop-appeal on this record. Like every English band, the Primal Scream won’t shy away from writing and arranging a potential hit-single, and have done so various times in the past. But this record is maybe to much of one bloc, on big piece of music to be really conceived as a single’s-record. Sure, it follows the Elton-John-rule of record-making, i.e. a slow song follows a fast one follows a slow one follows a fast one, and so on and on and on, until you are fat, bald and old. But the whole atmosphere won’t allow teenage-girls to really fall into this trap, that is unless they are not of the dark and suicidal kind.

The record opens with an almost punk-like guitar-riff, almost like The Godfathers (another great English band from that time) but the fragile and soft voice of Gillespie really adds another tone. You can feel him almost giving up against this big wailing wall of guitars, always waiting for them to calm down again, before starting to sing again. “Ivy Ivy Ivy”, as that song is called, is more than a straight away rocker about a boy being in love with a girl, because the ever-relooping “Ivy you destroy” part of the lyrics really set a dark and sombre tone to this dancefloor-smasher. Right off next, after some cold and eruptive guitar-noises is the piano-ballad “you’re just dead skin to me” which is again on the same topic: the destructive powers of love. And that’s it right there, you are won over (if you are not, it is your own fault) and the rest of the record keeps up the same pace and level.