Heaviest of Rotations

Currently listening, and re-listening, and then one mo' again

Screamdelica by Primal Scream

I’ll be honest with you — and I find that honesty about these things is generally the best policy, even if it does make one look rather foolish in retrospect — I did not come to Screamadelica when it was released in 1991. I was lost in Motown tunes, classic rock, and whatever pop was pumping through FM radio (probably, top of my head, Paula Abdul, Boyz II Men, and Mariah Carey).

I found Screamadelica from Mojo magazine during one of the many retrospective music mags hock to sell copies, and I had to have a quiet word with myself.

What Bobby Gillespie and company did — and this is the part that I think gets lost when people reach for their adjectives — was not simply bolt a pair of turntables onto a guitar band and call it a revolution. It was more reckless and more honest than that. They fell into something. They went to the parties, took the pills, listened to what was pouring out of Chicago and Detroit and the warehouses of Manchester, and rather than taking notes like journalists, they dissolved into it. The result is an album that sounds less like a calculated pivot than like a very convincing dream someone had and then, remarkably, managed to write down before waking up.

There are moments on Screamadelica that drift, that meander, that seem to lose themselves in their own atmosphere. I have heard people say this as criticism. I have never entirely understood why. Some of the most interesting journeys I’ve taken have involved getting thoroughly lost, and the best travel companions are the ones who don’t panic when the map runs out. Primal Scream seem constitutionally unbothered by destination. They are, on this record, magnificently, defiantly interested in the texture of the moment.

It is an album that arrived at exactly the right time, made by people who had immersed themselves in exactly the right music, and produced with exactly the right combination of discipline and beautiful chaos. I’ve played it more times than I could count, and it still does something to the room.

That, in the end, is really all I ask.