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THE REVIEW
This is not just a (new review) of that housedelic fetish, Screamadelica, 30 years after its emergence among rock and non-rock people.
This is also a sigh, awaited and open towards a new horizon.
Above my shattered refuges
Above my collapsed lighthouses
On the walls of my tedium
I write your name
Liberty
(P. Eluard)
A fire, even the most devastating, has among its most interesting aspects, the initiation, almost ritual, of the sinister.
From the timid emergence of combustion, naked to our irises, they gradually and progressively soar towards the sky, barely smiled at by the rainbow, clouds of intense black smoke and laughing flames, which will once again mock our human impotence.
Probably even a Revolution, from its Genesis, replicates the same sinister path in the Polis.
Who knows what Bobby Gillespie, ice-cold drummer of Jesus And The Mary Chain, thought when he realized that rock could go (even) beyond a worn-out reissue of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges.
Who would have ever thought, with such ease, from the dust and worn texts of Verlaine, of Joyce, from the dust settling on books and vinyls in the basement of his Glasgow cottage, to find himself suddenly after a Keith Richards riff, on the shore of Detroit's most acid and exclusive club.
And who knows how many times that stubborn Scotsman, raised by his mom on bacon and Supremes, displayed the daredevil and wild mimicry of Peter Fonda / Heavenly Blues, his personal cinematic totem of rebellion, in embryo form.
From the classical theatre of the ancient Greeks, whose dramas socially allowed to hypnotize the public and uplift their spirit, art, among many things, would also have the function of freeing man from conditioning, from the lightest to the most deadly.
Free the people, like the poetics of Genet, Jarman, Garcia Lorca, Cocteau. From all conditioning, from globalizing and current ideologies, now more than ever.
Isn't that right, Bobby?
In that bastard year of 1991, the Primal Scream, in their sublimely planned data planning by that devil Alan McGee,
were supposed to,
unambiguously, set Madchester ablaze with flames higher than the Sun itself,
exile and banish the last shoegazers,
put the city to fire and sword with Bacchanalian revelries and lysergic dances,
that would once again disturb Rock in an irreversible manner after the first
infatuation in 1975 with the Philadelphia Soul of Young Americans.
Screamadelica was the awakening from the sexy and scorching nightmare of Bobby Gillespie, probably the Zenith of a personality certainly chaotic but deeply transformative and transparent.
The meeting with Andrew Weatherall was fatal, like that between Visconti and the White Duke, a wild empathy developed between two personalities from opposite poles, which would soon generate a genre alchemy never realized before.
We are far from the stylistic perfection of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, but in this context, probably not purely musical but also temporal, we go even further, because Gillespie & Co.'s work effectively overturned a postpunk nostalgic and intimate by suffocating it in the spatiality of a distorted pop, corrupted and contaminatedby electronic and dub sounds.
“I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Had“ (a track composed by Robert Young, Andrew Innes, and Bobby Gillespie) was the most blues-like gem of the previous album, simply named Primal Scream; which without particular highlights almost went unnoticed in Albion, despite the presence of some already mature tracks.
In that track, a psychedelic Trojan horse secretly hid, the Germ of the future Revolution.
Andy Weatherall, a very active DJ and producer in the early '90s, between one acid and another added to the original track, present in the previous album, Stones-like and vaudeville-inspired in Villefranche, a round and marked bass with a hetero club groove, effectively teleporting an unbelieving and stunned Glimmer Twins into Bleu Detroit.
He incorporated into the drum machine the drum sounds of “What I Am,” a track by Eddie Brickell & New Bohemians (imported from an Italian bootleg), about minute 0:40, the soul gospel voices of the Emotions from “I Don’t Wanna Lose Your Love” (by a breathtaking derby they had laid down Baby Love's Supremes, supported by Gillespie, but Andy prevailed), the horns of John Hawkins's “Free Style.”
In conclusion, Gillespie, theatrical and spectral, sang Terraplane Blues by Robert Johnson at the end.
From an experiment on drum machines, born from the initial rebellious sample of Heavenly Blues (an outrageous Peter Fonda leading an anarchic biker band, in the cult film - The Wild Angels - by Corman, ranted against reactionary authorities, in that infamous intro “We wanna be free,We wanna be free to do whatWe wanna do“), in a perfect fitting of neo-classical, baroque, and transversal avant-garde; Loaded was ready to become the soundtrack for a new generation of hippies.
“Higher Than The Sun“, another gem of Screamadelica, is the unexpected Scottish Glenlivet candy at that party, the enchanted smile of Beauty of which you now only remember the seductive shadow after that trip with no return. It is the slow descent into the valley of Ennom, the discovery of a fascinating and truly free world, which you would have never expected. At the entrance, in the foyer, a butler in a tuxedo whispers to you that the two dub symphonies are actually 3, maybe 5, maybe there isn’t an exact number to describe them, everything becomes indifferent, time and space effectively disappear from coordinates; perhaps this is the union of heaven with hell. From the architraves of this delirious piece, in its second version, Jah Wobble is in control with a bassline that takes you far away, to the constellation of Gemini.
Is this perhaps the best of all possible worlds, old Pangloss?
And then why should we detach ourselves from our inner and healthy madness, perhaps to acquire all those surrogates, which you beg every day to sell us?
No thanks, we'll keep going like this. With our dreams, but above all our nightmares.
Well, we wanna be free, 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 (away baby, let's go)
We're gonna have a good time, we're gonna have a party
Wroom Wroom.
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Summary by Bot
This review revisits Primal Scream’s iconic 1991 album Screamadelica, celebrating its revolutionary fusion of psychedelic rock, electronic, and dub sounds. It highlights Bobby Gillespie's transformative vision and Andrew Weatherall’s vital production role that redefined the Madchester scene. The album is praised as both a cultural milestone and a timeless call for freedom and artistic rebellion.Tracklist Lyrics Videos
Primal Scream
Primal Scream are a Scottish rock band, formed in the 1980s and fronted by Bobby Gillespie, widely noted for stylistic reinvention across psychedelic/indie rock, dance-rock and electronic-inflected rock. Their 1991 album Screamadelica is frequently cited as a landmark crossover of rock with dance music.25 Reviews
Other reviews
By Mellon
"The perfect fusion between House and Pop invents a new and brilliant formula that changed the course of the '90s."
"Primal dared such moves with such ease and calmness, proving how far ahead they were compared to stagnant Brit-pop."
By Mr. Wolf
"Screamadelica cannot be denied the credit of being one of the most creative and inspired albums of recent years."
"By giving free rein to everyone’s creativity and inspiration, this album was born where rock takes on unusual and inspired forms."
By telespallabob771
It’s infinitely sweet to immerse oneself in a nebulous past, made more of sensations than of memories now erased over time by the distraction of memory.
You will see that one day we will all meet again, it will return, and we will dance and sing and hail some of our sign of belonging and we will be satisfied.
By Battlegods
"Screamadelica is precisely that kind of sonic Eden—a box where everything is in its right place with no dead spots or imperfections."
"'Higher Than The Sun' is the true zenith of the rave era, blending pulsing dub bass with ethereal vocals and swaying drum kits."
