One of the albums I’ve been consistently playing over the last year has been Primal Scream’s 1991 release Screamadelica. It is a timeless piece of music that is widely acclaimed as one of the best albums of the 1990s, yet I’ve found that not very many people in and around Gen Y are familiar with it.
Its originality came from merging dub, gospel and experimental sounds with big house drums and rhythms. This often resulted in a very trippy, spaced-out sound, which was probably in no small part an affect of their heavy drug intake at the time. There’s an infamous tour-story about the bandmates arguing with one another over whether to get Vietnamese, Chinese or Indian: a journalist asked them if they’d settle for a burger and the band informed him, “It’s heroin we’re discussing, not food!”
Loaded is my favourite track and probably the best place to begin to get a feel for the album. Inner Flight would make a good soundtrack to a movie scene where a junkie feels the first affects of a heroin hit and Slip Inside This House is a more conventionally styled house track that is actually a cover of highly influential American psych-rock band 13th Floor Elevators from 1967.
I strongly recommend you get the album and listen to it from start to finish even if these tracks don’t grab you straight away.
Primal Scream – Slip Inside This House
13th Floor Elevators – Slip Inside This House
Primal Scream – Screamadelica (Open link in new tab – Filesonic.com link)
Cheers,
Adso
One Response to Screamadelica
Getting loaded « Around the edges
Replied on: October 1, 2011, 4:46 am
[...] was prompted by an interview with Bobby Gillespie to dig out a copy of Screamadelica, a record I’ve always liked. Listening to it again after a while I was struck by – and [...]