Massive Attacks "Blue Lines" Vs. Primal Screams "Screamadelica"

Screamadelica has "Movin' On Up", "Don't Fight, Feel It", "Come Together", "Loaded" and "Damaged".

So?

Mr. Scrub,

I tend to agree, but Be Thankful For What You've Got" is FAAAAR worse.

http://www.alfred.edu/summer/Students-%20Coffee%20House%20lr.jpg

vs.

http://www.antagovision.com/ignitepics/103102halloween/images/image010.jpg

On the other hand, Blue Lines is, for me, one of the five greatest albums of all time and I love it unreservedly and can never hear it enough.

(This is helped by seeing them live a few times, and one of the performances of "Loaded" would be among my favourite live performances ever.)

My girl at the time of this album just broke up with me. She went to this show with her new guy, they play this song and lost I lost it. One of the most intense feelings at a live show I have ever felt.

No, that's me too. Hence, Screamadelica wins.

Foxbase Alpha is better than both of them though!

Plus it's their best album, while Massive Attack got way better on "Protection".

Primal Scream started strong, fell off big, came storming back, and have since levelled out- most would say they're treading water at the moment, at best. That said, one of the reasons for this erratic career is that they've constantly updated their sound and taken risks, sometimes with success, and sometimes with failure.

Massive Attack started strong, stayed that way, but never really came up with anything new. They're like Underworld- all you can expect from them at this point is more of the same. Most would say they're on their way out, or already over.

Massive Attack has a greater success ratio, but I go with Primal Scream for having the bigger nuts. oops- guess I decided!

Ha! Ronan summed up my rant in a sentence...

Martin, I never thought you'd be able to shock me ever again but somehow you've managed it.

Apparantly Primal Scream have finished their new album - they wrote and recorded it in three weeks with Youth producing.

I love both of these albums, toughie to choose really. I guess i gotta go with the scream though in the end.

blue lines is great. shara nelson has an amazing voice. it's got 'unfinished sympathy' and 'safe from harm' on it.
screamadelica is shit. bobby gillespie has never hit a note in his life. i do like some primal scream songs, but none from this album.

some people in this thread have shocked me.

S/Delica has a few decent musical ideas (Higher Than The Sun is tolerable), but they're not Gillespie's, nor Innes or Young's. It's 90% piffle.

and?

well, yeah. but fortunately he's hardly on any of 'screamadelica'.

and nothing.

I remember being vaguely impressed by the underwater sounds of "Higher Than The Sun" when it came out, but the rest of Screamadelica is sequencer chaff, rockworm pastiche (a rockworm is a bookworm who knows a lot about rock), drug references... I'm completely astonished that it's done so well in critics' polls. I suspect they associate it with their e-popping days of glory.

"Daydreaming" and "Unfinished Sympathy", on the other hand, were absolutely determinant: this was going to be the sound of the 90s. The video for "Daydreaming" blew me away, and "Unfinished Sympathy" just has this emotional tug. I suspect the presence of real black people has something to do with it. You know, Primal Scream's Andrew Innes is competent, and Weatherall pulled some nice production tricks out of his palace of swords, but was there a talent like Tricky in Primal Scream?

oh no you didn't!

Threads like this make me think that a whole lot of you guys are really insane.

As for 'Screamadelica', Gillespie annoys me of course but enough to render the fine ideas throughout this album (recycled/regurgitated as most of them may be) worthless. 'Don't Fight It, Feel It' in particular will always be classic.

Unable to pick one over the other though. It's actually a great TS because they're too lauded albums from the same era that warrant some re-evaluation now given their 'soundtrack for British youth' status.

"Hymn of the Big Wheel" is definitely the only song on either album you could argue this for.

My brightest star’s my inner light let it guide me
Experience and innocence bleed inside me
Hallucinogens can open me or untie me
I drift in inner space, free of time
I find a higher state of grace, in my mind
I’m beautiful

with

One day as I lay humping under Popocatepetl
The volcano started pumping down hot liquid metal
A flood of steaming lava erupted like Pompeii
And stuck me forever to the hippo I was fucking that day
Then a team of boring scientists shoved us in a crate
Packed it up with straw and then conveyed me and my mate
To the Museum of Natural History, where between two stuffed camels
They stuck us in this case labelled 'Copulating Artiodactyl Mammals'

No contest, really.

Horace Andy would have done a lovely job on those lyrics.

i can't imagine many things more unpleasant than taking e to primal scream.

'movin on up' is ghastly but i remember worse stuff on there.

There isn't a single song on Blue Lines that I would ever discard.

It just feels incredibly shallow musically and barely rewarding as a dance record, an ambient record... or a record of any type from this time. Let alone a supposedly multi-faceted acid house/rock crossover masterpiece.

Honestly the whole "worship me I am the wee Glasgow Jim Morrison and drugs will bring us all together free from ego (his, hopefully)" crap vocals and general sense of pastichery is just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm just relieved Oasis never made anything like this or we really would never hear the end of it.

http://s41.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2LHX92I7Z1KBK3JRHTCTMP0V5E

there is no world in which it is a flawless album though!

You mean shit coffee table nonrock music?

fwiw here's how i rate the tracks on Blue Lines:

1 Blue Lines (4:21)
2 Unfinished Sympathy (5:08
3 Daydreaming (4:14)
4 Five Man Army (6:04)
5 One Love (4:48)
6 Hymn Of The Big Wheel (6:36)
7 Be Thankful For What You’ve Got (4:09)
8 Safe From Harm (5:16)
9 Lately (4:26)

"Screamadelica has its moments but these are primarily the responsibility of non-Primals Andrew Weatherall and The Orb, among others. Even so, it sounds pretty, well, vacant 12 years on. Clearly, there was a higher tolerance level back then for loose, baggy grooves which long outstay their welcome, like some coked up Scally at a house party, or like “Don’t Fight It, Feel It”, tumble tediously on like a washing machine on some endless cycle.

Elsewhere, cliches once thought dead and buried after they’d been fucked to death are disinterred, scrubbed and presented as fresh ideas. The sitar-flavoured cosmic levitation of “Higher Than The Sun”, which finds Gillespie having to be nudged down from the studio ceiling with a bargepole must have been music to the ears of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, rubbing his hands at the prospect of a new generation of drug-addled popsters with plenty of inner space between their ears to rip off.

Then there’s the roping in of gospel singers to make suitably reaffirmative noises on “Move On Up” and “Come Together”, endorphin bursts of quasi-religiosity for white agnostic boys. Gillespie is one of those people who finds the Sixties brand of blackness most congenial, when they were oppressed and authentic, rather than the more urbane, emancipated sort of blackness you get nowadays. By standing close to figures like George Clinton (who guests on Give Out But Don’t Give Up), or by quoting some thunderously empty rhetoric about music having no categories from Jesse Jackson, he hopes that some of their realness and soulfulness will rub off on him by osmosis."

Massive Attack did nothing for me until "Karmacoma". "Unfinished Sympathy" is 1% as epic as it intends to be.

The song Blue Lines and Five Man Army set the formula, but Karmacoma is just the 3d/Tricky interplay. Ever heard the remixes with just 3d and Daddy G?

Yes, I really have nothing worthwhile to add to this thread since I just have some vague instinct that Blue Lines is better because I listen to it more often. It's the sound of potential, some of which was wasted. Screamadelica is just the sound of some baggy clothes and a good producer making a stop on the way through the early 1990s. Seriously, I love Primal Scream but they only work when doing a particular pastiche or shaped by the right people. And half the general audience hates the Stones pastiches.

Gear's post basically sums up the thread, I think.

this is sub-reynolds horseshit.

as for the 'congenial' bit -- perhaps gillespie romanticizes the civil rights and black power movements a bit, but it's idiotic to say he finds the situation of american blacks in the '60s 'congenial'. where on this record does gillespie celebrate oppression?

as for 'the more urbane, emancipated sort of blackness you get nowadays' -- this is staggeringly glib, i can't even speak to it.

Blue Lines, on the other hand, flows. It's got cohesion, an organicness perhaps - all the tracks, although varied, sound like the product of the same group. Primal Scream didn't achieve this until Vanishing Point (I'm ignoring their first 2 albums), which is their best, I reckon.

hmm.

'loaded' = jan 1990
'screamadelica' = sept 1991

Trainspotting, Stuka Dub (ok maybe most of Echo Dek), Get Duffy, maybe Deep Hit Of The Morning Sun

"Slip Inside This House" wasn't on "Screamadelica" was it?

is this in the same way that 'biology' has a house section?

-- The Lex (alex.macpherso...), January 10th, 2006.

yeah, sort of. over 20-odd years, house has encompassed a fair few styles and textures. mid-section of 'biology' is as 'house' as it is 'electropop'.

yes, it makes you dance round the room singing 'i love indie'.

You can probably tell that I'm not the world's biggest Primals fan, but I actually think "Vanishing Point" is a good album. And underrated, compared with the adulation "Screamadelica" gets. Fashion is fickle.

the key word may be 'Balearic' as this was applied to anything that fitted ideas of House but with a significantly slower tempo (in this case some 15-20bpm slower?) - see also Mental Generation's 'Cafe Del Mar', Movement 98 (early Oakenfold & Osbourne project) 'Joy And Heartbreak', The Grid's 'Flotation' and a whole bunch of other tracks from that time.

they were hip in indie-dance circles -- mondays, roses, soup dragons.

xpost -- i love those tracks! they are balearic house. so still house.

Tom Scott & the LA Express: (Ode 1974)
* "Sneakin' in the Back" (Drums)
Massive Attack - "Blue Lines"

anyway, to business. "screamadelica" all the way. i know it's a drug-addled mess made by saucer-eyed mooks, but it still somehow sounds vibrant and exciting and i associate it with getting ready to go out and have FUN. "blue lines", on the other hand, i associate with dank student flats in edinburgh, smoking shit joints and wondering if someone, somewhere, was having a better time.

simple reasons, but they seal it for me.

I find it hard to hold onto antipathy towards albums these days though. Don't fight it feel it, the big wheel keeps on turning anyways man.

probablt because both were held up (in the uk anyway) as 'the best albums ever' (kind of) in the mid-nineties, and 'blue lines' was especially seen as a benchmark, genre-inventing record. there's more at stake than the tunes.

A cheap analogy is for the following albums, Massive Attack twiddled some knobs, and Bobbie Gillespie, in one of his more important actions at the time, fecked the guitar into the amp and walked away. Except of course it'd be more like "fished the guitar out of the amp and checked the tuning". And I have no idea if this was even his doing, maybe they were all on for doing Screamadelica II but Weatherall couldn't be arsed.

As regards the records, Dan's more or less on the money. Blue Lines is fucking quality throughout, but you have to choke down so much shit to get to the good stuff in Screamadelica.

i'm not sure where the 'so much shit' is on 'screamadelica'. 'damaged' is the only totally shit track i can think of, and that's no worse than 'hymn of the big wheel'.

scan / type the LOADED bit from 1990 in here will u please?

i'd do it but i'm in werk.

the single mix is, but the album version is classic. as is 'loaded'.

Er, have you forgotten what the singing on them sounds like (ignoring that they are both inferior retreads of "Loaded")?

The Farley & Heller remix of 'Loaded' might be better than the original mix(es).

Primal Scream had to be pop stars because of a homosocial pact between Alan McGee and Bobby Gillespie. But the terrible irony was the fact that the record which finally achieved this didn't contain Bobby. The price of Bobby's stardom was mixing Bobby right off his own record! What's more, "Loaded" doesn't even sound like the group Primal Scream, as they then conceived themselves. It's a few elements selected and slowed down by Weatherall from "I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have", a much more conservative rocking number off their previous album. Having achieved brand recognition with "Loaded", it was imperative, for the band's dignity and for the homosocial pact, that the Scream "be themselves" again. It wasn't enough that people should know the name Primal Scream, they had to like Primal Scream as they really were, ie rock traditionalists who liked bluesy punky guitar rock, and had a skinny narcissistic singer whose every second lyric was about how "stars" "shine" when they take enough drugs. So, after "Screamadelica" (despite the title the least Screamadelic thing they'd ever released), the samples and dubby space were out and in their stead was plaintive, off-key Bobby again, and rawk guitars again, and rehashed Stones licks. But alas the British public met "Give Out But Don't Give Up" with indifference. And The Scream were sidelined on their own label by Oasis (Noel once memorably dismissed the Scream's music as "artsy fartsy disco").

also, I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have >>>>>>>>>Loaded.

However, Blue Lines is pretty dire. I went back recently to relisten, and "Unfinished Sympathy" is just annyoing. It may be due to overplay, but I think it just simply hasn't held up well. "Be Thankful" is still a nice cover, but has nothing on the original. "Blue Lines" and "Five Man Army" are still nice, but I prefer the similar-styled tracks on Protection a lot better. "Safe From Harm" is still a terrific track, probably my pick from the album. I liked this record a lot more before I'd had my "education"/immersion in dub a few years ago.

All in all my pick is Screamadelica, but neither is a perfect album as many in this thread have argued. I'd second Fox Base Alpha as a far superior pick for "the sound of '91"

And lastly, temper all this with the fact that I *love,love,love" Candyflip's Madstock and would probably choose that and the St Et record over either of the ones in this TS

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/dre400/e402/e40246l1e9h.jpg

1991 was one of those years where (for whatever reason) certain albums really stuck in my head. probably because it was the same era as my first experiences with e and the like. i was 16-17 that year. turning point and all that

"Kiss me, won’t you won’t you kiss me
Won’t you won’t you kiss me
Lift me right out of this world
Trip me, won’t you won’t you trip me
Won’t you won’t you trip me
Lift me ride me to the stars

I’m free you’re free
I want you to touch me
Come touch me
Now it’s all too much
All too much
All too much"

MASSIVE ATTACK WINS YAY!