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.