Screamadelica (1991)

I wandered almost sideways into one of my favorite albums of 1991, pulling Primal Scream's “Come Together” single out of a newspaper office slush pile. I was attracted by the Boomer-bait of a song that might be related to the Beatles and another, “Loaded,” that might have something to do with the Velvet Underground. As it turns out the latter has something to do with a Peter Fonda / Nancy Sinatra movie directed by Roger Corman, The Wild Angels (with Bruce Dern! Diane Ladd! Michael J. Pollard!). Mudhoney got to the quoted sample first, a few years earlier on the track “In ‘n’ Out of Grace” from their Superfuzz Bigmuff EP. “Just what is it that you want to do?” a square preacher-man is heard asking. “We wanna be free!” says Fonda. “We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we're gonna do.” It’s a pretty good setup, whether you follow it with the sublime grunge squall of Mudhoney or the Manchester soul vamp of Primal Scream, decked out with a gleaming dense unassailable titanium bottom. That maxi-single was generous, with two versions of “Come Together” and three of “Loaded” and two other tracks besides. But even though “Come Together” and “Loaded” were the first two singles from the Screamadelica album at large, I would not call the horns and soul singer treatment of those tracks typical of the album, which I was introduced to later by an evangelist of all things UK. Not that there’s anything particularly typical to this album, which ranges far and wide. Or, as the totality of my notes on recent forays into Screamadelica put it: THIS ALBUM IS A JOURNEY.

It’s the third by Primal Scream but a stark turn into house and techno, led by Bobby Gillespie, who was the drummer for the Jesus and Mary Chain on Psychocandy. The third single, “Higher Than the Sun” (which also gets an eight-minute dub treatment toward the end of the album), is more the right speed here. It spends half its 3:38 on a spacewalk, free floating, with Gillespie taking the binky out to coo and warble awhile on cosmic matters. Then the drugs kick in at about the 1:48 mark and, true to the Spacemen 3 ambition of making music for the purpose, it warps into a squelching psychedelic recreation of unique proportions and pleasure. See you on the other side. In fact, “Higher Than the Sun” is a culmination of the album’s opening suite, four or five songs taking the time to set a mood, perhaps best captured in the title of the one that goes seven minutes, “Don’t Fight It, Feel It.” There’s also a remarkably evocative cover of the 13th Floor Elevators’ “Slip Inside This House.” Credit to producer Andrew Weatherall for much of these soundscapes, and credit to Gillespie for handing the reins over to him, though other producers are involved here as well: Hugo Nicolson, The Orb, Hypnotone, and (yes) Jimmy Miller. “Come Together” and “Loaded” ground the album in soul and “Damaged” has tentacles reaching into peak Rolling Stones, mainly by way of Jimmy Miller’s production. But Gillespie sounds amazingly at home there as well. The album, which clocks in well over an hour, returns to outer space for the finish. Is it the rave experience or intended to be? I don’t know, but I know I feel wrung out in all the best ways when I take the time to play the album all the way through. Stone classic.