Earlier this month, feeling nostalgic and slightly bored, and having neglected to do so last year, I decided to pick out my top ten albums of the last decade. I put the list up here, without giving any reasons for my choices. In this series, I will look at each album in turn and explain how it came into my life and why I love it so.
#10
Primal Scream
XTRMNTR
[2000]
XTRMNTR is almost single-handedly responsible for opening me up to electronic music. Prior to this, I was very much of the mindset that if a song wasn’t played on “real” instruments, it wasn’t really worth listening to. R.E.M.’s Up might have softened me up a little, but there was still considerable resistance to anything not guitar-based.
I can’t remember exactly when I got the album. I had, at whatever point it was, been familiar with Primal Scream for some time. I have very vague recollections of their Screamadelica-era videos being on TV and of them winning the Mercury Music Prize. I never got Screamadelica, though, nor its follow-up with ‘Rocks’ on it. Vanishing Point slipped under my radar when it was released in 1997, though I’d later come to know and love that one.
I do have a distinct memory of the video for ‘Kill All Hippies’, the second single from XTRMNTR, appearing on MTV2 one afternoon. I was immediately transfixed by the vivid visual style: monochrome film footage of WAR and SPORTS, together with lots of RED. But I had to change the channel quickly because I found the song was so annoying. It had all these drum loops and synthesizer parts and crazy effects and Bobby Gillespie kept singing the same few words over and over and over again. It was all so inorganic, so UNmusical, so ugh.
It was definitely sometime after July 2001 when I did get it. In that month’s issue of Q magazine, they had a list of their 50 Heaviest Albums Of All Time. This was one of them. I was a little bit confused. I wasn’t sure how that music from that video fit on a list mostly populated by hard rock and heavy metal albums. Could you really be heavy with keyboards?
The appearance on that list piqued my interest. The fact that Kevin Shields was involved further aroused my curiosity – it was about the same time that I was in full obsession mode with regard to My Bloody Valentine and their Loveless album. So, too, superficially enough, did the album title attract me. XTRMNTR: no vowels, all sharp, angular consonants (we’ll give R the benefit of the doubt). I decided to give it a chance.
This was during the first wave of peer-to-peer file sharing, where we were all downloading individual tracks rather than whole albums. I got two: ’Insect Royalty’ and ’Exterminator’. The former was fun. I was able to embrace the loops beats, the intermittent beeps and blips, the bizarre pitch shifted vocals. I still didn’t see how it was heavy, exactly, but I was enjoying it. The later track, I absolutely loved. It had this completely infectious groove. The repetition – one of the main things that had put me off electronic, especially dance, music for years – was its greatest asset. The bass was relentless, pummeling away throughout the song, while various instruments and sounds came in and out. I was hooked. I picked up a copy of the album on CD soon after.
‘Kill All Hippies’ opens proceedings. It took me a few listens to shake off my initial impression of it. I eventually got it, but it was definitely not immediate. On the other hand, the second track, ‘Accelerator’, is the epitome of immediacy. It’s loud, fast, heavy. It rocks. Hard. ‘Exterminator’ follows and then…
‘Swastika Eyes’. So much of my love for this album is comes from my love of this song. It’s so good, they had to put it on the album twice! Well, okay, the second version, the Chemical Brothers mix, is the album’s weakest link. It really wasn’t necessary and it’s really disappointing it was that mix which was released as a single – meaning that, unfortunately, it was the mix present on the karaoke machines I encountered in Japan.
Anyway, the first version, the REAL version, mixed by Jagz Kooner, is utterly phenomenal. Over seven minutes long, starting with a squealing siren and never letting up, save for a lull five minutes in, allowing you to collect your self before the propulsive finale. Looking back, it seems impossible that someone with such an allergy to all things electronic could ever have found himself listening to a track like this and loving it. But that’s what happened.
When I did my first ever stint as a DJ, five or so years later, in a tiny bar in Nagasaki, I centred my set around the version of ‘Swastika Eyes’ on Primal Scream’s Live in Japan CD. That performance matches the Jagz Kooner mix, but at a higher tempo, with a blaring extended intro. I was so focused on getting that song cued correctly that I neglected to realize I had let the same four bars of the Chemical Brothers’ ‘Hey Boy Hey Girl’ loop for a couple of minutes. Oops.
Back to the album. Coming off ‘Swastika Eyes’, we come to ‘Pills’. Some people have dismissed ‘Pills’ as a bit of an embarrassment; Bobby G. as some kind of drunk uncle, trying and failing to do hip-hop. I can see where they’re coming from, but I think they might be taking it a bit too seriously. Of course, I might not be taking it as seriously as was intended. Maybe I have become the drunk uncle.
The latter half of the album is made up of: the brilliant instrumental, ‘Blood Money’; the album’s one slow song, ‘Keep Your Dreams’; ‘Insect Royalty’; Kevin Shields’s ‘MBV Arkestra’; the aforementioned, inferior mix of ‘Swastika Eyes’; and, to finish, ‘Shoot Speed/Kill Light’. Overall, the second half is a slight step down from the first. The later songs have similar sonic textures, giving the album as a whole the requisite cohesion, but quality-wise, the consistency is perhaps a little lacking.
So does it really deserve a place in my top ten? Aren’t there other, more consistent options? What about () or Takk… by Sigur Rós? Joanna Newsom’s first two albums? Well, yes. But this is the nature of these lists. If I sat down to do a top ten of the last decade again now, I could probably swap a couple of choices. Who knows how different my selections would be a decade from now. But on that day, at that time, this album, its first four tracks and the adrenaline rush they gave me – and continue to give me – stood out in my mind.
As I said, this album opened me up to a whole other sphere of music, to listen to and also to make. I still can’t work out precisely when I bought XTRMNTR. I know it was after that Q issue and I also know it was before May 2003. In that month, I dusted off the old Yamaha keyboard I had as a child and recorded my first proper electronic-based song, leading to all sorts of synthesizer adventures. I’m not sure if you think that’s a good thing or not, but I’m sure I’ll get round to writing something here in an attempt to convince you it was.
