When Primal Scream began the process of recording their fifth album XTRMNTR in 1999, the cyberchaos portended by the looming Y2K panic was still months over the horizon. It’d be two years still before the 9/11 attacks precipitated a new era of paranoia and fear, and four before the U.S. Congress provided President George W. Bush authorization to declare war on Iraq. Another 13 years after that, the UK would extract itself from the European Union via the “Brexit” initiative, and that same year, a crude and grotesque caricature would claim the U.S. presidency for the first of two non-consecutive terms. And then came the global Covid pandemic, war, genocide, and a global rise in authoritarianism.
Though the relative calm of the ’90s, at least by the standards of where we are now, carried its own reasons for cynicism and anger—a bubbling unrest that came to a boil at the WTO protests in Seattle—Nostradamus himself likely couldn’t have seen the level of ruin this planet has brought upon itself in the 21st century. But from the outset of XTRMNTR‘s first song, “Kill All Hippies,” with its windup of siren-like synth sounds, strings that act like harbingers of doom and a melody that nods to Labi Siffre’s “I Got The” (a year after Eminem mined the same song for “My Name Is”), Primal Scream offer a warning for something dark looming over the horizon. It sounds like war.
XTRMNTR is Primal Scream’s loudest and angriest record—as vocalist Bobby Gillespie once described it, “an attack.” Where the Scottish group emerged in the ’80s amid a landscape of jangly C86 bands and eventually found their way toward acid house and baggy sounds with the acclaimed Screamadelica in 1991, XTRMNTR nearly does away with good vibes entirely. Heavily armed with electronic sounds—including a Chemical Brothers mix of single “Swastika Eyes,” a song that appears on the album twice—and wrapped in noise as armor, it’s as confrontational as Primal Scream has ever sounded, with the business end of their assault aimed at the oligarchs, oppressors and warmongers that, well, led us to where we are now.
Gillespie told The Guardian in 2000, “We still think of ourselves as a punk band because that’s where we started from, but the anger is more to do with writing about what we see, and what we see is people being betrayed, being dumped on by a government that was meant to be an alternative to Toryism but is simply a continuation of it. If there’s a lot of anger on this record, it’s the anger of the betrayed.”
Primal Scream’s 1997 album Vanishing Point provided a blueprint of sorts for the depths of sonic extremity they’d pursue more fully on XTRMNTR, juxtaposing darker, dubbier exercises such as “Kowalski” and “Vanishing Point” with the rock ‘n’ roll noise of their cover of Motörhead’s “Motörhead.” Fittingly, that same year they responded to show cancellations, supposedly done out of respect to the death of Princess Diana, with requisite vitriol: “Primal Scream have no respect whatsoever for Diana Spencer or any member of the English royal family. We are totally opposed to the monarchy.”
On XTRMNTR, they double down on both club sounds and righteous chaos, even when engineering it for maximum club appeal, as on “Swastika Eyes,” a thumping Big Beat destroyer that seems to recognize a rising, white supremacist authoritarian threat for what it is, Gillespie singling out “Scabs, police, government thieves/Venal psychic amputees” and puts them on notice: “I see your autosuggestion psychology, elimination policy, a military-industrial illusion of democracy.” (Sound familiar?) By contrast, “Accelerator,” a Stooges-y speed-freak bombardment of everything all at once with noise to spare, races through addictions, vice and paranoia: “Voices screaming in my head, into the future, into the future.” The group briefly turns away from the polemics on “Blood Money,” an action-packed psychedelic head trip that moves like a cross between a chase montage and DJ Shadow’s “The Number Song.” But “Pills,” a kinda-sorta rap song with great energy but not necessarily great rapping, climaxes with Gillespie sneering with hostility, “Sick! Sick! Sick! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!“
One of the secret weapons in Primal Scream’s arsenal is Gary “Mani” Mounfield, also of The Stone Roses, who had joined the group prior to the release of Vanishing Point. His dirty bass grooves carve out a path for pummeling accusations aimed at the powers that be on the title track (“Exterminate the underclass, exterminate the telepaths,” “All jails are concentration camps, all judges are bought“) and lends a dub-inflected sense of cool as counterpoint to the panic of “Kill All Hippies.” The latter song takes its name from the opening sample, taken from the 1980 film Out of the Blue, though it could just as easily be taken as a burying of the same band that once carved out a sonic flower groove—much in the way De La Soul did likewise with their own D.A.I.S.Y. Age. And though Gillespie’s chants of “You’ve got the money, I got the soul” might be a permutation on the same enterprising cliches of Pet Shop Boys’ “Opportunities,” a closer look would suggest that they’re mutually exclusive.
XTRMNTR‘s other notable guest is My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields, who made a notable comeback after spending most of the ’90s not releasing a follow-up to Loveless. He lends production and mixing (and guitar) to three of the album’s most guitar-centric tracks, including the speaker-destroying “Accelerator,” as well as the transcendent hallucination of a closer, “Shoot Speed Kill Light,” and a trip through a paisley wormhole on “MBV Arkestra,” notably named for his own (at that time defunct) band. Two of those three songs represent something of a mesmerizing diversion from the anger and vitriol, but by no means a respite from the noise or volume.
There’s only one real moment of light or gentleness on the entire album, however, and that’s “Keep Your Dreams,” a lullaby that softens Gillespie’s approach even amid its surroundings of shrapnel and ruin. “I believe in forgiveness, hate will eat you whole,” he sings, offering an olive branch along with an encouragement to keep in your back pocket: “Keep your dreams, don’t sell your soul.”
As XTRMNTR seemed to signal a new, more turbulent era of geopolitics, it marked the end a smaller cultural era. More specifically, the end of legendary UK label Creation, which had seen the release of albums from the likes of Oasis and My Bloody Valentine, closing out its inspiring run with XTRMNTR as its final release. Label head Alan McGee still made headlines, however, when he railed against the Mercury Prize for snubbing the album in favor of the more commercially pleasing sensibilities of albums like Coldplay’s Parachutes who made, as he put it, “bedwetters’ music.” He later apologized, though not necessarily because he changed his mind about Coldplay—just that what came after them was so much worse.
Certain versions of XTRMNTR tacked extra songs onto the end of the tracklist, including the group’s cover of Nuggets-era psych band The Third Bardo’s “I’m Five Years Ahead of My Time.” More than anything it’s a bridge of the psychedelia of years past with the coming future, but it’s hard not to read more into that statement, even if it’s an undercount by a factor of five. I can’t hear, for instance, a song like Fontaines D.C.’s “Starburster” without likewise hearing echoes of this album. I also can’t look around at the chaos around us without feeling like the “anger of the betrayed” that they packed into an hour of electronic mayhem was actually a warning.
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