what are the direct influences on XTRMNTR /PRML SCRM

Plus the unparalleled delusionment levels that induced Mr Gillespie to try rapping.

listening to it, influences sound like hawkwind, sigue sigue sputnik

kate!! full circle ile thread or what, eh?

XTRMNTR has got the best set of influences of lately IMO, if we're talking this kind of librarian/filological approach to making music.

Note that "Miss Lucifer" is shockingly similar to Front 242's "Welcome To Paradise"

surely only countable as an influence on Kevin Shields in Vanishing Point period not Primal Scream on XTRMNTR album k thx

hahahahaha

also public enemy and dennis hopper & peter fonda

what were the beltin rmxs off this project? (obv, apart from
the mbv arkestra).

yeah, but the remix was on the LP k thx

big influenc : Kylie Manogue
(should have bee achnowledged in the Kate Moss part, but Kyle's not cool and too close to the skin for the band to do)

Gillespie would protest it's the influence of "Yes Giorgio" European music. Stylie disco.

equals

"Take Your Mother Out" (Scissor Sisters)

one, the poptimists have accepted radical chic: like MIA, bobby gillespie combines gauche political content with a sometimes grating vocal style (on this last point YMMV, obv).

two: all the hip influences on one compact disc. reynolds once called primal scream a kind of wish-fulfillment mechanism for bobby g's rock fantasies, a vehicle for whatever was the hot sound: acid house, krautrock, free jazz: always the right record collection. this is kind of a fair criticism, but necessarily one that appeals more to music critics than fans. can are not actually a household name, so the criticism 'oh, can, such an *obviously* cred reference' has its weaknesses (cf 'baile funk': most people who will buy 'arular' will not have heard of this).

this latter point also applies to lcd soundsystem, which has, unlike the scream, a level of autocritique, but still at the end of the day is about having the hip reference points. and in fact the references are quite similar.

so is it possible to get past the obvious gillespie problem and maybe acknowledge that the scream are overhated. also: 'accelerator' is better than any garage-influenced track of the last half-decade.

It all sounds better on paper than on the record. I bought David Holmes' 'Bow Down to the Exit Sign', at the same time, and always think of them together. it covers similar ground.

I also would like to contend the discopunk tag of XTRMNTR, but it's just as much its own modernisation of Scremadelica as Echoes.

from theprimalscream.com:
March 14, 2005
Album News Update
The Scream are apparently half way through the recording of the the album, a friend of the band has told me. No gigs are planned anytime soon. So I suspect the album will be out this year, fingers crossed!

and on an interview piece Bobby did with the Cramps there's this: At the end of the article there was a line saying a new primal Scream record would be released in 2005

Murphy and Goldsworthy originally met in inauspicious circumstances, as hired help for DJ-producer David Holmes, who was making one of his "soundtrack for a nonexistent movie"-type albums in Manhattan. Murphy did the engineering, Goldsworthy did the programming. The location was Murphy's West 13th Street recording studio (now DFA's sound lab). It didn't take long for the two technicians to suspect they were making most of the creative decisions. "Tim and I were forced to create a dialogue about how to make sounds, because there was just this vague cloud of ideas coming from Holmes," says Murphy, gesturing to the back of the studio.

They were tipped in 1999; that's when they got their first NME cover, I believe. The album took an age to emerge.

Kill All Hippies still sounds pretty amazing. I like this album a lot.

at the time, it was the fist significant album of the millenium

OTM ^^

and yeah, this album roolz.

Significant to who exactly?

yo momma

Aye, true, that Boabby Gillespie's affy poapular wi' elderly Scottish women

albums that made top 10 between jan and march 2000:
Gabrielle - Rise (re-entry)
Limp Bizkit - Significant Other (re-entry)
Enigma - The Screen Behind The Mirror
William Orbit - Pieces In A Modern Style
Paul Simon - Tales From New York - The Very Best Of
Primal Scream - Xtrmntr
Marvin Gaye - The Love Songs
Eels - Daisies Of The Galaxy
Oasis - Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants
Smashing Pumpkins - Machina / The Machines Of God
Celine Dion - All The Way... A Decade Of Songs (re-entry)
Shania Twain - The Woman In Me
Vengaboys - The Platinum Album!

muchos significos

'keep yr dreams' is still wondrous and optimistic and has a child's toy twinkly xylophone sound too amid all the resr of the album's racket.
that's important i think.

randomly played "5 yrs ahead of my time" on friday...and LIKED it...

goddamn this would be genius if bobby gillespie had kept up his drumming and stfu.

Are all the tracks on that album cover versions? Or can Bob just not be arsed thinking up original titles for his songs?

the latter.

i listened to this album an awful, awful lot when it came out, and adored it. listening to it again last month, for the first time in ages, it didn't have anything like the same appeal -- it sounded softer, weedier than i remembered -- but i guess that's because i've explored some of the source material a little more and have higher standards now, or some such shite.

certainly, "swastika eyes" (both versions) wasn't anything like the frenzied monster i remembered. "keep your dreams" is still ace, though, yes.

... oh, and "shoot speed kill light" is one of the only good things barney sumner's been involved with in the best part of 10 years, natch.

XTRMNTR was kind of my soundtrack to the millennium. Plus, that one and Evil Heat made Riot City Blues so disappointingly awful.

i am the only person in the known world who likes riot city blues, i think.

How about "hard" dance acts such as The Prodigy?

I don't think they like Riot City Blues, Geir.

^^^^

it saved Andrew Weatherall's life!

so, two of you then.

I really loved some non-album track that was on a sampler (I think from Fader or Q) that I can't put my finger on now, but I hated this album at the time. I'm listening to it again right now and finding that I like it a lot more. Maybe I don't pay attention to lyrics as much, maybe there's been more stuff like it that I've acclimated to. I remember feeling let down at the time because it wasn't nearly as heavy or as dense or as noisy as I'd been led to believe—it just sounded like some wanky Brit gibbering over some boring beats with a bit of guitar to round things out.

I dunno. I'm only halfway through Exterminator now (after liking the first couple tracks) and it's starting to drag on… Maybe 2000 me was right and I'll remember why in a little bit, but I'm now kinda sad that I just chucked the promo in the trash after no one would buy it off of me.

Ah, yeah, it was tracks like "Pills." That's the problem. Bad rapping, generic beat, stupid lyrics…

what was the non-album track?

Dog Latin has never heard this.

As for direct influences - Shields sampled Miles Davis' On The Corner for the MBV Arkestra.

I haven't listened to this in a long while, but still think of it as a key record in my... musical history, for want of a better phrase. I think the Miles influence, as corrupted as it is, elevates this a way above most of the coat-tailing discopunk (bar LCD).

Tim Goldsworthy aided production on some tracks, did he not? I know there's a pre-DFA connection somewhere.

iirc 'burning wheel' off of 'vanishing point' has a massive sample from miles... bitches' brew?

I'd check liner notes but all my CDs are a few thousand km away...

There are tracks on 'Screamadelica' with acknowledged Davis samples, but I'm not sure about anything on 'VP'.

Shields sampled Miles Davis' On The Corner for the MBV Arkestra. - the B-side so good, it was included on the next album. 10 years on (!) & it still sounds totally futuristic. I sometimes fantasize that there is a scrapped MBV archive of tracks like this, but with more guitar noize & B. Butcher vox.

Coat-tailing? WTF? This album is not actually that influential Nick - it's more a case of shared influence.

I don't think either of us could prove that either way, to get a bit Mark S about it. I do think, though, that whether or not people tried to consciously ape it or not, no XTRMNTR (and no Bow Down To The Exit Sign) would mean no DFA, and no DFA would mean no... ell, y'know. No discopunk.

I put this on a few days ago, after seeing it as the NME'S no. 3 of the decade - not because the NME's opinion has much moral force for me, but merely because it brought it to mind. I have to say, it still sounds pretty tremendous. In particular, "Pills", irrespective, and maybe even partially because, of Bobby G's much-maligned rapping, is just awesome.

seriously mindblowing that no-one mentioned PiL on this thread; blood money is a straight reinterpretation of birds, the rest of the lp still has shades of graveyard (maybe a better touchstone for vanishing point, but still).

i loved this to bits and have no idea how it would hold up now, but most of ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ is just ad hominen bobby hating. this and the record before it are sweet examples of people swirling their influences around in a cup, making a broth out of what they've got etc.

kinda surprised by all the talk of this album's influence. "without xtrmntr, there would be no dfa," that kinda thing. makes as much sense to me as the suggestion that without six finger satellite there would be no dfa. or without peaches... (actually, the former of those DOES make sense to me: i'd more likely trace the origins of the dfa to 6fs' "sea of tranquility", but i'm ignorant as to these things.)

just never saw xtrmntr as a significant album wr2 american rock/dance music - maybe it meant more in the uk?

remember listening to it when it came out and thinking that it reflected nine inch nails' influence more than anything else. relistening, i feel the same way: technology and aesthetics borrowed from dance and industrial music; an obsession with noise, density & harshness; and a somewhat canned/freeze-dried sound that signifies sexy chaos without ever really coming apart at the seams (and in that sense falling well shy of the downward spiral's mark).

i hear pretty hate machine and even depeche mode more than than i do can, sun ra or miles davis. to that chassis they strap echoes of then-contemporary developments in club music (hip hop, dub, downtempo/trip hop, etc.) and a wide variety of rock, punk and art music signifiers, but they don't do much beyond that. as a result it feels more like a successful summation & packaging of an era's trends than an enduring statement of its own - amazing shields remix notwithstanding.

not saying it's a bad or a forgettable record, but it's not one i've ever seen as game changing. maybe i'm missing something...

also an intermittent hectoring/declamatory/pseudo-military quality that seems to owe something to rage against the machine

I don't see the Depeche Mode similarities, aside from maybe "Keep Your Dreams". It's otherwise far too abrasive for that. I have never seen it either as a pioneering album, more as a stand-alone.

This actually brings me back to the amusing orgy of name-dropping that was in vogue at the time of this album, death in vegas' contino sessions and david holmes' bow down to the exit sign. In interviews, it seemed DIV and DH in particular would just punctuate all their sentences with some variation of the words "velvets stooges mc5" or "ornette coleman mbv can".

the song "exterminator" reminds me very much of violator-era dm, with more noise added. in fact, a lot of xtrmntr can fairly be described as [something fairly conventional] "with more noise added". the added noise does give it a revolutionary quality, but since it's added rather than intrinsic, the record often feels a bit forced. i don't want to be so constantly reminded how revolutionary it's all supposed to be.

^ but i'm a hater, so take w a big grain of bad tasting salt

'accelerator' is better than any garage-influenced track of the last half-decade.

― N_RQ, Friday, 18 March 2005 09:58 (4 years ago) Bookmark

think i probably spiritually agree with this too; it seemed like someone taking garage somewhere futuristic rather than trying to perfect the right kind of archaic skuzz.

gah! it seems like someone pasting unsurprising bits of digital glitter onto an UTTERLY bog standard "garage rock" track - something that, absent the superfluous future-skree, no one would pay the least bit of attention to. compare with inventive, forward-thinking garage music like that produced by the hospitals, indian jewelry, les georges leningrad, oneida, etc. but then maybe i've got a different idea of what garage means.

i mean, compare w royal trux circa ACCELERATOR for reference

20 years, christ

https://thequietus.com/articles/27719-primal-scream-xtrmntr-exterminator-review-anniversary

ah what a coincidence I was just rediscovering this album yesterday (not aware at all it was precisely its 20th anniversary) !
Loved it at the time and still find it pretty good.
Also, otm that Quietus article : " Shields remained a touring member of the band until 2006 and Primal Scream were unquestionably one of the greatest live bands on the planet in this iteration."
They were awesome on the XTRMNTR tour.

yeah that tour was my only chance to see them live and it was incredible

20 years, christ

seen at least 3 other pieces about this album today lol

So weird, I could've sworn there were other albums released in 2000.

I thought so too but, turns out, nope:

https://www.spin.com/2000/12/20-best-albums-2000/your-hard-drive/

just dawned on me that I have (and still occasionally wear) a 20-year old t-shirt.

20? Pssht. Get back to me when you have 30 year old ones. (Slowdive 92, MBV 92 -- two of them!, etc.)

I recently found a box of some old high school era clothes in my parents' attic, including concert shirts from The Kinks' Low Budget tour (must be 79?) and Rush - Permanent Waves (80 I think.) Both still in decent shape.