Primal Scream - Exterminator

***

(Creation)

Review: Russell Baillie

The first big Brit album of the year isn't Oasis but labelmates Primal Scream, the ratbag bunch who spent the 90s mixing old rock and new dance with a blunt-bladed blender and chemically inspired enthusiasm.

Actually, Exterminator is the last album on Creation. The label's mercurial head, Alan McGhee, has chucked it in for online interests, and the lesser stars of its roster are being scattered to uncertain futures.

And fittingly, Primal Scream here do sound like something falling apart and feeling rightly peeved about it, the album exuding a mix of menace and sonic malevolence.

Much of that sting comes care of their producer/mixer ring-ins who include Kevin Shields (of the long-time-missing art-noiseniks My Bloody Valentine), dub-meister Adrian Sherwood (who worked on Echo Dek, the remix version of the Scream's previous long-player, Vanishing Point) and the Chemical Brothers, who offer a remixed reprise of the single Swastika Eyes late in the piece.

It's Shields' tracks, however, that make Exterminator an aural bora bomb, whether it's the Stooges-like fuzzathon of Accelerator, the thrilling reworking of the Vanishing Point track If They Move Kill 'Em as MBV Arkestra (which, as its name suggests, is Sun Ra space-groove with guitar frequency overload), or the closing Shoot Speed/Kill Light with its Joy Division bass-heaviness.

It's big on funkier throb too, from the opening sampledelica of Kill All Hippies, the title track as well as the pounding original mix of Swastika Eyes, which, with anti-fascist slogan lyrics, should see it topping the Vienna hit parade any day now.

But it still feels like a less-than-glorious mess all round. Frontman Bobby Gillespie, the singer-who-can't shows he's a rapper-who-can't either on the irksome Pills. Add the Chemical Brothers' and Shields' remixes, and the previously soundtrack -released Insect Royalty and this feels like a scrappy, sporadically impressive add-on to Vanishing Point.

But if Shields and the Scream got together on a whole album, then we might be talking.