Primal Scream - Disc of the day

Primal Scream
Prml Scrm Live In Japan

(Sony Music Japan, 2003)

Wtht dbt th dfntv vrsn f PrmlScrm n rcrd.

Like the life-long friend who’s invited home in a mood of high celebration, only to grope your other half and vomit into the plant pot, Primal Scream have an uncanny knack of arsing things up at exactly the point where you love them most. So, after inviting in My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields and proper drummer Darrin Mooney into the fold and giving vent to the manic insect squall of digital-black brain-noise that was 2000’s XTRMNTR, the never-consistent Scream followed up with the double merely-OK of 2002’s Evil Heat and 2006’s sonic soul yawn, Riot City Blues. However, sandwiched in-between those two chronic misfires was this live wonder. If the Scream have always sat oddly between the weedy and world-shattering, with Bobby Gillespie’s undernourished exhortations always in need of a vitamin shot and a leg-up, then Live In Japan could be hailed as the band’s quintessential recording. Sonically, the mix is locked in a mysterious midpoint between the sonic overload of Iggy’s remastered Raw Power and the annoying tin buzz of a mosquito trapped in a bread bin, while Boaby’s scrawny soul ministrations are ’roided up to something approaching iron giant scale thanks to the brute deep-space mach-wave exoskeleton of Shields, Mani, Mooney et al. It’s fast, sweaty, driving, deep and relentless and, fittingly, the band kinda run out of steam about two-thirds of the way in, finally cross the finishing line like little Dorando Pietri: cough, splutter, wheeze. How very Scream, but how very wonderful.

Andrew Male

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 16/04/2008