In what I hope will be a very regular feature of my Gilded Palace, I bring you the first album of the week. All who read the blog are encouraged to listen to and absorb the full album which I suggest and review in this space. Comments would also be welcome, as I like to actually discuss music as instead simply appreciating it.
The first AOTW is not the Flying Burrito Brothers classic whose name I shamelessly pilfered for this blog's title, but Primal Scream's XTRMNTR.
Although overshadowed by both the other rocktronica monolith released in 2000, Radiohead's Kid A, and the band's own 1991 Dance-Rock-Soul masterpiece Screamadelica, XTRMNTR manages to outclass both in almost every conceivable way. It sounds absolutely cutting edge seven years later, where Screamadelica would have sounded dated two years after it was released. It maintains the forward motion it sets with its first four tracks for the album's entire running time, something at which Kid A fails quite terribly.
As for how it actually sounds? Well, the all consonant title is wholly appropriate. XTRMNTR sounds incredibly harsh, the result of an absolutely ridiculous amount of compression in the mastering process. Normally, records sound hideous when this technique is employed, as most music is meant to sound open and breathable. However, the music on XTRMNTR is best when it sounds claustrophobic and suffocating. Synths wail and moan, guitars crash against each other in a maelstrom, Bobby Gillespie rants about military-industrial illusions of democracy and syphilis (which he has an odd fascination with throughout the album), and all the while the rhythm section keeps things moving at a brisk, coldly uniform pace. It isn't meant to make you dance, it's meant to make you march.
Violently leftist politics seem to be the point of the album, and the opening salvo of "Kill All Hippies" is both a political slogan and a rebuke of the Scream's 60's fetishizing past. Other titles include "Accelerator", "Exterminator", "Blood Money", "Insect Royalty", and "Shoot Speed/Kill Light", which make it perfectly clear that the band is wholly focused taking what it wants by force. What it wants is not exactly clear, however. The lyrics never really attack any explicit targets, but rather the rich and powerful members of society--the theme seems to be best expressed in "Kill All Hippies": "You've got the money/I've got the soul/Can't be bought/Can't be owned".
The standout track here is the Jagz Kooner mix of "Swastika Eyes", an indictment, apparently, of the Israeli government. What the band lacks in tact it more than makes up for in the song's hypnotic, head-beating groove, laying former Stone Rose Mani's awesome bassline over layers of synths and an unchanging hi-hat beat. For seven minutes the song maintains a steady, high level intensity, never really climaxing because it doesn't need to. The album's only misstep is including the Chemical Brothers remix of the song, which is not only redundant, and wholly inferior to the Kooner mix, but nearly kills the flow of the entire album.
I haven't even mentioned the fact that My Bloody Valentine genius Kevin Shields came out of hibernation and produced some of the record's finest tracks, or that Bobby Gillespie finally stopped trying to be Mick Jagger and instead focused on being Bobby Gillespie. What's so remarkable about this album is that a group of people thought to be ten years past their relevance to modern music--Shields, Mani, the concept of Primal Scream in general--managed to make one of the most forward-looking and revolutionary albums in history. The Scream hasn't come anywhere close to this in the last seven years, but then no one thought they could ever top Screamadelica either. At the beginning of the next decade, we'll see.
