Primal Scream Self Titled

[Desiderato Chouinard]

DeepVoices is a labor of love. If love is equal in both passion and blindness. I love nothing like I love music, which is not a slight to other things. Music is unique, inanimate, gorgeous. It does not love you back but it will make you feel like it does. Why? How? Deep Voices does not answer these questions but it tries its best to. And it includes a one-hour playlist that will make you ask them, too. If you enjoy Deep Voices, consider supporting this project with a paid subscription :) Thank you.

What did the \u201990s sound like? Whatever noise Andrew Weatherall happened to be making that day. The British producer, most notable for his work behind Primal Scream and their album Screamadelica, developed an ecstatic hybrid of house, techno, and rock, with touches of hip-hop drums and an otherwise vast collection of percussion. No one in the time since has been as able to as fully synthesize the aesthetic of bliss into music.

I\u2019ve been listening to a lot of Weatherall\u2019s productions lately (since the monarchy death music edition of Deep Voices a few weeks ago) and, this being Deep Voices #90, I thought it would be nice to center it around the person who I think really best defines the decade. Technically there\u2019s only one Weatherall track here. Leading off the mix is a miracle of a song from the 1993 Weatherall-produced (newly on streaming!) album by the trio One Dove. From there are tracks made by his contemporaries and then others who have walked in his footsteps. A tribute, not a compendium.

Weatherall died in 2020, too young. He was skeptical of his own contributions to music. \u201CI never meant this to be a career,\u201D he said. \u201CIt was just a job that paid for new clothes and records.\u201D I love his laissez-faire dedication to populism. Looking back with a shoulder shrug in 2016: \u201CHere we are at the apex of the punk-rock dream, the democratization of art, anyone can do it, and what a double-edged sword that\u2019s turned out to be, has it not?\u201D Depends on who\u2019s holding sword. He had a good grip.

\u2022Bless my friend Rachel who got me into One Dove a couple years ago. Not to brag, but I was lucky enough to find an affordable copy of their lone album Morning Dove White on Discogs (the cover is trashed, it\u2019s got BPMs written on the run out grooves in silver marker, but it plays great). He began recording it around the time Screamadelica was released, and it has many of that record\u2019s hallmarks: funky percussion, reverb all over the vocals, disco keyboard lines played at half speed, drums borrowed from both early techno records and Def Jam productions, guitar solos, and the sheen of the best shoegaze records that were being released. Here are some comparisons for fun: Imagine if Larry Heard had produced Portishead with Bruce Hornsby on keys. Imagine if Rick Rubin went to college in Ibiza, not NYU, and the Beastie Boys had gotten into acid, not booze. Imagine if My Bloody Valentine had been given proper mental health treatment and celebrated their 25th birthdays recording an album about appreciating each other\u2019s good heartedness. Alas, the album was not a big hit and the band broke up (singer Dot Allison has released several good solo albums).

\u2022The extremely knowledgeable-on-Weatherall blog Bagging Area has a sweet anecdote posted from One Dove guitarist Ian Carmichael about working on the album. \u201CWhen I arrived [late to recording], breathless and sweaty and terrified, I was thinking I've kept this VIP DJ waiting outside on the doorstep for 20 minutes; he's going to be so pissed off and I'm the biggest jerk in the world. He was sitting reading NME. Smiling. Smiling BIG. The reviews of Screamadelica had just come out that day. The NME saved my life.\u201D Weatherall, along with his Sabres of Dancehall crew, worked on the album, its diversity of sound, its wide-eyed adventurousness is perfect. A true pleasure to listen to.

There are also an extensive amount of alternate mixes and remixes released. The Sabres\u2019 \u201CParadise Mix\u201D of \u201CTransient Truth,\u201D with its whispered vocals and avalanche of percussion is as good if not better than anything on the album.

\u2022The second two tracks on this week\u2019s playlist both feature vocals from Seefeel\u2019s Sarah Peacock. Seefeel, blended shoegaze and techno perfectly, and Peacock\u2019s vocals soft, plainspoken singing carried the songs. Scala is all of Seefeel plus Locust producer Mark Van Hoen. Their 1998 album To You In Alpha is heavy, like they were digging into the ground while Seefeel attempted to float into the sky. I like this track \u201CBlank Narrow Shut\u201D best; it sounds like someone accidentally left their elbow on the high end of a church organ while recording a tense piece of shoegaze and they decided just to leave it.

On the one-off Echo Park collaboration with the very \u201990s title, \u201CRazor Kiss,\u201D Peacock implores you to \u201Cclose your eyes\u201D behind the backbeat that defines the decade. Could have been the soundtrack to either a makeout or a runaway scene in Girl, Interrupted or a party in the Matrix. \u201CIs it safe to be alone?\u201D she asks. Doesn\u2019t sound like it.

\u2022Weatherall\u2019s longtime partner in the duo Two Lone Swordsmen, Keith Tenniswood, has a project called Radioactive Man. His self-titled debut album for the project has one arguably perfect IDM track, the curiously named \u201CGoodnight Morton.\u201D It doesn\u2019t do much other than twinkle with a little bit of percussive pitter patter before fizzling with 20 seconds left, like a star that burns out. If you\u2019re looking for something beautiful, and you don\u2019t need much, it\u2019s more than plenty.

\u2022Another group, were Weatherall still alive, I could see him working with, is Berlin duo a.s.o. Their debut album from last year was a dark, slinky update to trip-hop (the talented producer Tornado Wallace is half of the group). They recently released a remix EP with two tracks in particular that are distinctly Weatherallian, one by the producer Cousin who I highlighted in Deep Voices #81 that makes nimble use of his hand drum wizardry, and the one (which I included on this week\u2019s Deep Voices) by the ambient dub super group Purelink which gently harnesses that same essential \u201990s backbeat as \u201CRazor Kiss.\u201D I could see a lot of people doing that rolling-an-invisible-orb dance at a rave to this one. Sometimes people talk about music being an update to a sound as a compliment\u2014indie rock, but make it Gen Alpha\u2014as though progress in and of itself is a worthwhile artistic component. That\u2019s not the approach here. The sound quality of this track is super high, owing, I assume to technological advances not available before the turn of the century. But if you told me this was released in \u201995 I would believe you. And I\u2019d think it was amazing. Isn\u2019t that enough? The future isn\u2019t always essential.

Hypnotone were Tony Martin, a Manchester producer with Martin Mittler (bassist from Intastella and Laugh) and later Cordelia Ruddock (who Tony discovered at a fashion show). Hypnotone signed to Creation which led to work with Primal Scream and The Lilac Time, both Creation acts at the time. Their self- titled mini album from 1990 is a lost gem, an early 90s time capsule.

Hypnotonic, all piano house, rattling 808s and a very early 90s rap courtesy of Carlos (2 Supreme), was a 1991 single was recorded at Out Of The Blue in Manchester, a studio in the then semi- derelict Ancoats area, now part of the ever growing regeneration of central Manchester.

Channeling all of that hurt and anger into her delivery and lyrics, Low Dose is a cathartic primal scream backed by a equally visceral band featuring ex-members of Fight Amp. Marrying all of the emotion, empathy and experience of its players, a new band was born kicking and screaming into the world.

Primal Scream's career has been a series of adventures that have seen the band recording era-defining albums like 1991's Screamadelica, digging deep into the past to excavate classic rock tropes, and playing music that sounds like it was beamed in from the future. No matter what path they follow, their love of music and daredevil spirit never wane. Formed by vocalist Bobby Gillespie, they started off playing a Byrds-like brand of indie pop that jangled with all the sweetness that Gillespie's former group the Jesus and Mary Chain lacked. In a move the

Primal Scream's career has been a series of adventures that have seen the band recording era-defining albums like 1991's Screamadelica, digging deep into the past to excavate classic rock tropes, and playing music that sounds like it was beamed in from the future. No matter what path they follow, their love of music and daredevil spirit never wane. Formed by vocalist Bobby Gillespie, they started off playing a Byrds-like brand of indie pop that jangled with all the sweetness that Gillespie's former group the Jesus and Mary Chain lacked. In a move the group repeated over and over, they changed sounds drastically, becoming hard rockers la the Stooges. Swept up in the blossoming acid house scene, and with the help of producers like Andrew Weatherall (who worked on their landmark single "Loaded"), the Orb, and Jimmy Miller, they created a sound that mixed indie pop, country ballads, techno, dub, and psychedelia on Screamadelica. The album broke down musical boundaries, helped fuse the techno and indie scenes, and made the band worldwide stars. From there, the group shifted gears relentlessly, swerving from straight-ahead boogie rock on 1994's Give Out But Don't Give Up to electro-rock on 1997's Vanishing Point to experimental noise on 2000's XTRMNTR in what seemed like a breathless rush. The band continued this unpredictable pattern as they gained legendary status, alternating new albums like 2013's More Light -- which bends genres with the same flair as Screamadelica -- with commemorative reissues like Demodelica, a rarities collection released as part of Screamadelica's 30th anniversary.

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