A Year of Blind Spots: Screamadelica

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Screamadelica

Primal Scream

1991

What 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die has to say about Screamadelica by Primal Scream:

While bands such as the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses had been taking cues from club culture for a while, Screamadelica tore down the barriers. Bug-eyed dance fiends found merit in rock, floppy-haired indie-rockers cut loose on the dance floor, and suddenly, anyone who did not have a copy felt rather square.

Previously, Primal Scream had been an unremarkable jangly rock band with a couple of albums under their belt. However, acid house was taking off in Britain, and, in 1990, they got DJ Andrew Weatherall to experiment with remixing their track "I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have."

The result was "Loaded." Stripped down, dubbed up, and with samples of Peter Fonda in Sixties biker movie The Wild Angels ("We wanna get loaded... we wanna have a good time"), it was a phenomenon. "Loaded" and the glorious gospel-house of "Come Together" that followed it formed the backbone of 1991's astonishing voyage into modern psychedelia (U.S./Japan pressings featured the less euphoric seven-inch version of "Come Together"). Weatherall retained the driving seat for most of its kaleidoscopic grooves, while Stones producer Jimmy Miller handled the two "rock" cuts—"Movin' On Up" and "Damaged." The Orb also crafted the mind-blowing alien dub transmission of "Higher Than the Sun," while Hypnotone helped whip 13th Floor Elevators' "Slip Inside This House" into a snarling, bass-driven beast.

A collaboration album, perhaps, but while the producers can claim much of the credit for the music, it was Primal Scream who had the vision to demonstrate that dance music could exist alongside rock.

What Joe has to say about Screamadelica by Primal Scream:

Back in 2018, my eventual favorite album of the year, Fucked Up's Dose Your Dreams, had a press release with a quote from Owen Pallett, indie rock weirdo who does Fucked Up's (and many others') string arrangements. Pallett said: "My god, Fucked Up have made their Screamadelica." I don't know why that's always stuck with me. Probably because the statement is obviously meant to carry a lot of weight and meaning, and at the time, I had no idea what Screamadelica was or why Dose Your Dreams might be compared to it.

Well, here we are. Perhaps it's my fault that I find it difficult to equate these two albums. I get what Pallett was going for, but to my ears, Fucked Up did an "and the kitchen sink" thing for Dose Your Dreams, which happened to include some acid house trappings, whereas with Screamadelica, that's basically the whole fucking thing. It could be that I am familiar with a lot of Fucked Up's discography, and this is my entryway into Primal Scream's, and so the impact of the acid house genre-switch is blunted for me. It could also be that I'm not huge on acid house in general, and so the more there is, the less I'm inclined to like it.

The most interesting 1001 Albums part of the blurb above is how it gets defensive about the idea that this could be perceived as a "collaborative album." They knew that someone like me might throw an accusation like that around. And you know what? The book was right. I would accuse Screamadelica of being a collaborative album, and I would question Primal Scream like the Bobs questioned Tom Smykowski at Initech: "What would you say you do here?"

Like, if you really were a rock band before this, and you passed some demos off to some high-end DJ producers, and they took your songs and made 'em into acid house anthems, and then the acid house of it all is the thing that made your album important, then... what exactly is Primal Scream contributing to the album's importance? Besides the byline, I mean. Ah well, who cares, this isn't important, I'm just saying.

The irony, I guess, is that the non-acid house songs are the best ones. There aren't many. I hold a grudge against the sequencing of this album, because putting "Movin' On Up" at the beginning of the album really faked me out good. The reaction upon hearing it for the first time was: "Oh wow, maybe we'll hear some decent British rock 'n' roll in this column for once." And then the rock 'n' roll was completely washed out. Pretty funny head-fake, all things considered. Doesn't make me like the album as much as I would have if there were nine more "Movin' On Up"s, but what can you do.

Generally, I'm just tired of being told that British house music is a thing. Stop trying to make it a thing, 1001 Albums. It's not a thing.