There you go, I’ve pretty much given you all you need to build the lyrics for any song on Primal Scream Riot City Blues. Just add in a suitable quotient of connectives and the odd name, Sally and Johnny seem particularly favoured here and Bobby Gillespie’s your badly-dancing uncle.
Released in 2006 Riot City Blues marks the point where I walked out on Primal Scream; literally as it happened when Mrs 1537 and I went to see them at Liverpool University on 21/11/06*.
Kevin Shields had left the ranks after delivering their two best LPs Evil Heat and XTRMNTR and seemed to take the band’s desire and/or ability to progress with him. If you ain’t a busy progressin’, then you be real busy regressin’ chile, as my granny used to tell me**. Primal Scream did, fixating on the amped-up Stones/Faces/New York Dolls sound they launched at us on ‘Rocks’.
Initially it was great, lead single ‘Country Girl’ is a powerhouse – all mandolin and commitment. It is a really great rollicking tune and was deservedly used all over the TV schedule for ages. The other stand out was another one where Primal Scream reach for the Stones via Heartbreakers via Sweet, ‘Dolls (Sweet Rock And Roll)’, with VV from the Kills adding her talents to the wheel. No subtlety here at all, just full on bad boy rock and roll stomp with a chorus that la-la-lasts for ages.
So there you go all-uptempo, forceful, stun guitar and wasted cool, all the fun of the fair. Right then Riot City Blues just gives you the limitations of that approach as the inspiration flags and you get real by-the-numbers bordering on parodic trash like ‘Nitty Gritty’^, where we get exhorted to ‘shake some action’, the Dylan-on-industrial-solvent of ‘The 99th Floor’ and the dire ‘Suicide Sally & Johnny Guitar’ – I can’t even bring myself to address the rent-a-controversy rosary lyrics. Yuk.
Things perk up a bit with the glazed-sounding ‘When The Bomb Drops’, although that ends up being an appropriately empty experience by the time it drawls to a close. I do like the eerie, atmospheric ‘Little Death’ though, which seems like the sour cousin of the band’s own ‘Autobahn 66’.
A positive chap like me is left clutching at straws again for the rest of Riot City Blues. I can offer Warren Ellis on violin on ‘Hell’s Comin’ Down’ and that ‘We’re Gonna Boogie’ isn’t half as bad as its title.
I am a loyal Lego chap but sometimes you just got to cut your ties, you know when its time. Riot City Blues was that moment, naturally like all insecure ex-lovers I creep back around to rummage through their bins but so far they haven’t cut anything I’ve liked since. So let us take the good from here and roll on down the road.
Sweet junkie soul shoot doctor hell garbage boobs suicide chrysanthemums; and you can quote me on that.
1054 Down.
PS: Great tune this, pretty stupid in a brilliant way:
*we realized we were really bored after 5 songs, gave them another to be fair, then went. We weren’t alone in doing so either.
**she was from Somerset, that’s how they speak there.
^the linguistic jury is still out on whether the phrase has slave-owning origins, so I will not criticise, save to say I would avoid using it.
I vaguely remember having an extended mix of Kowalski and a couple other tracks on CD from XTRMNTR – need to recheck that album – I like the future!
When you do this it makes me very curious. Warren Elis on violin is more than I can take. Thanks
2 great tracks here, which is damnably slim pickings across a whole LP. I reckon I sound a bit Mutiny on the Bounty, saying that.
No. Just honest. You steered me to the Crazy Horse album a few years ago. I’m still digging it (“Is that CB pulling my leg?”)
No way!
HAHAHAHA! You’ll never know the truth!
I can’t handle the truth!!
Stop it! This is getting to good. That line sound way better that way.
Oh dear!!!!
This may be one of my favorite break up pieces ever.
Thanks Neil, that’s really kind. You ever been really let down by someone you love, live?
Too many times Hawkwind, David Allen, Pink Floyd, Roy Harper but I feel like we let each other down then, the worst was Richard Thompson when it began to feel like he was doing Thompson by numbers but it took three gigs to realize, really felt betrayed. There’s a post or two here I feel.
Definitely a post.
Screamadelica & Vanishing Point are on the 1001 list – I shall try to stay for the duration of each album!
The former is excellent, the latter inconsistent. XTRMNTR from 2000 is much better, I suspect the book didn’t have a vacancy that year.
Alas, even the ones they originally included from the year 2000 are starting to be replaced by even newer albums in the updated editions!
Not a band I’ve spent time with, and from this excellent piece I can surmise there are some to get and some to avoid. Fair play!
Cheers Aaron. A band with wonderful record collections; sometimes that helps, sometimes that hinders.
Stephen King said (paraphrasing): “You can’t write if you don’t read.” I’d tend to think bands do better after immersing in other stuff.
Brilliant. Explains why I don’t have so much as a copy of this one. Suicide Sally & Johnny Guitar is one of the worst songs ever written. Redundant musically and lyrically. Bobby is better than that.
I’ve never walked out of a gig, but the only time I was tempted to was seeing Bob Dylan in 2005.
Cheers J. I’ve walked out of a couple, life’s too short to endure a shite, or even an average gig. I DEMAND TRANSCENDENCE!!
I like Primal Scream but they’re one of those bands by whom that I’m hard-pressed to like an entire album, Screamadelica being the one I exception.
The whole walking out of a concert thing reminds me of my two friends that went to see The Charlatans on their most recent tour. They had seen them live since the band’s early days and found them almost completely unrecognizable from their previous glory.
That’s a shame, I rather like Tim Burgess. I saw the once just as their debut came out.
Primal Scream were amazing around XTRMNTR, played one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen. Then got progressively… lesser.
I like Tim too but I haven’t seen The Charlies in years. As for the Primals, I only ever saw them the once, just after Give Out was released, and really enjoyed them. Can’t imagine what they’d sound like nowadays with all changes in sound over the years.
This was harsh in a fun and creative way which made it feel like a spoon full of sugar to help the bad medicine go down. Plus the drawing is a masterpiece and should be on your refrigerator!!
I occasionally stowed drawings away in books I was reading, or LPs I was listening to at the time. They’re always a pleasant surprise.
I have a horror of being too negative. Especially for bands who’ve given me good times previously. Nobody gets a pass for who they used to be though, they have higher standard to meet.
Nothing wrong with high standards`
Ouch leaving with others during the show. But if you didn’t get what you paid for…then out the door ya go.
Beat the traffic, always a bonus. I think we went for a pizza and a couple of drinks instead.
I like your daughter’s picture.
She spent all day every day drawing ladybirds!
There is something rather sad about leaving a gig by an international act. But I’m kinda glad you shared that part, as it feeds into how our musical faves change and we change and sometimes a gap opens up that is unbridgeable. I’ve heard that happens in life, too.
Life? not too sure about that, but it was a boring gig from a band who absolutely set me alight the first time I saw them. I think knowing when to cut your losses with an artist is a very good thing, I have no time at all for cheering inferior crumbs from the table of the once mighty – I hold the greats to a far higher standard than anyone else, because i know they are capable.
But yeah, two very good tracks and very little else on here.
So many zingers in this review but “naturally like all insecure ex-lovers I creep back around to rummage through their bins” is brilliance. Thanks for listening to a record I can never bring myself to. I adored this band from Velocity Girl to Kill All Hippies but Country Girl lost me
Cheers Steve. Obviously the bins bit was a use of my fertile imagination, not an admission before my forthcoming court case. Definitely not.
XTRMNTR is the one for me. The track ‘Accelerator’ just fried all my circuitry at once the first time I heard it and then, when I saw them on that tour … orbit was achieved.
Screamadelica – the whole album and Kowalski – the single, both exquisite sounds.
That’s all I got on Primal Scream.
Both superb points 00. To that I’d add the XTRMNTR album, which still sounds like the future to me, 20 years on.