TS: Primal Scream vs The Jesus & Mary Chain

the mary chain, not even close for me.

Full disclosure: I like but don't love Psychocandy, whereas I think XTRMNTR is one of the greatest albums of the noughties. Screamadelica and Vanishing Point are pretty good too.

well - JAMC are immortal for the first two + Honey’s Dead, but they never made an album as batshit brilliant as XTRMNTR, so

^^^ knows what's up.

I love, love, love Screamadelica, but have never had much time for the rest of Primal Scream's output.

The Jesus and Mary Chain, on the other hand, are a fundamental part of my understanding of what I want rock music to do. Not close.

JMC immediately.

Mary chain for psychocandy and the hair alone

This is actually a pretty hard choice for me, but I think JAMC get points taken away for not breaking up immediately after releasing Psychocandy, which is a perfect one-and-done album. And Primal Scream have three and a half great albums (Screamadelica, Vanishing Point/Echo Dek, and XTRMNTR) that sound like the work of three totally different bands. So them.

ILX in underrating Automatic shockah

automatic rules

this is very, very hard for me to pick. JAMC have never put out a bad album, even the last one is ok but Primal Scream have put out bad albums. live they are both some of the best shows i have ever seen, and have seen both over five times. i would have to give the live experience to Primal Scream however. them opening up for Depeche Mode too was insanity.

voted Mary Chain and one day i will run that artist poll that i signed up for years ago

Is anyone who voted for the Chain not a fan of easygoing 60s pop? Because while the distortion wrapper makes those melodies more palatable, I can't fully overcome my indifference to the stuff, even in that paradoxical setting.

I haven’t listened to automatic all the way but “head on” rules

Automatic is OK but it's not in the league of its predecessor or followup albums. Too monochromatic and a little synthetic.

I've only heard Psychocandy by the JaMC (which is fine), and I bet they never made anything quite as pointless as Give Out But Don't Give Up. Screamadelica is not really for me either, but still voting Primal Scream, for XTRMNTR.

xtrmntr & "higher than the sun" are enough to take this fairly easily for JAMC

i mean for PS over JAMC lol

JAMC have always seemed kinda like a you had to be there thing to me. like psychocandy is alright but i think detached from its context of nothing else really sounding like it at the time it doesn't hold up that well? it's not bad, just doesn't feel particularly special to me or anything

it holds up really well!

most of the songs don't quite manage to cut through the noise that well enough to be memorable to me & i'm not really a fan of the sound of anything from that era that tries to be really noisy like it, most noisy 80s indie stuff frustrates me because the production just feels so harsh

darklands is probably my favourite jamc but it's just solid rather than being exciting like primal scream at their best on xtrmntr

ooh unless we are talking about cage fighting, in which case I would change my vote sharpish

Ah, cmon!

I like JAMC but for me it's easily PS : XTRMNTR is great and Vanishing Point/Echo Dek are also very good.
Somehow I never particularly liked Screamadelica except "Moving On Up" and "Loaded", although I've listened to it again recently and enjoy it more than at the time.
And the tour for XTRMNTR was arguably the most exciting concert I've attended.

I love PS, but this is easily goes to the Mary Chain and I'm sure Bobby G. would agree. PS weathered a lot of cultural changes very well and stayed relevant for a long time (both Screamadelica and XTRMNTR are incredible), but JAMC dropped a sonic bomb into pop culture *and* wrote timeless songs. Over time, I've listened to 'Darklands' (and their other mellower songs) much more than 'Psychocandy' which I tend to agree is both brilliant but more of its time (or maybe I'm just too old for it now).

love the XTRMNTR worship in this thread, it is a beast

I’ve tried to get into Screamedelica because of ILM and failed every time. JAMC by miles and miles.

Have you tried getting into XTRMNTR, though? It's their best album.

I actually had no idea people liked XTRMNTR so much! I thought they were known most for Screamadelica (and Spotify playcounts seem to confirm this)

team Automatic > Psychocandy

I got off the bus when I got a promo of the Kowalski cd single, and found it underwhelming

I actually had no idea people liked XTRMNTR so much! I thought they were known most for Screamadelica (and Spotify playcounts seem to confirm this)

Maybe it's a generational thing? I was 15 when XTRMNTR dropped and it was my introduction to Primal Scream. I read up on the legend of Screamadelica soon after, and when I finally heard it a couple of years later, I struggled with its dated sonics. I've since come around, but the post-big beat aggression of XTRMNTR is what keeps pulling me back.

screamadelica is certainly their best known & most-acclaimed but xtrmntr is their best work. i never hear anyone say they've done anything worthwhile anything except those two and vanishing point.

Evil Heat is imo a decent effort, but the Trinity remains, yeah.

XTRMNTR is one of these albums I remember hearing for the first time

i never hear anyone say they've done anything worthwhile anything except those two and vanishing point

Dixie-Narco EP is croosh if only for Screamadelica (the song)

i never hear anyone say they've done anything worthwhile anything except those two and vanishing point.

Ahem, Velocity Girl??!

(still voting JAMC. there's something a little too try-hard about Bobby Gillespe. Probably because I can't unremember their Stones phase)

I only discovered XTRMNTR last year, it was the sound of 2020 for me, and I'm over 50!

J&MC were all the rage at my college radio station but never clicked for me, despite repeated efforts, outside of some of the early singles.

Taking Sides: trying too hard vs not trying hard enough

But which one is which? 🤔

both have surely been both at various points each

Primal Scream have made maybe 2.5 great albums (all thanks to Wetherall and Shields) and a couple of decades of absolute shit.
Jesus & Mary Chain I don't hate but cannot fathom the appeal of either, nothing has ever grabbed me in their music and I've tried, really I have.
Going to be a reluctant vote for the scream I suppose.

one great record each but one without a history of talking utter shite at every invitation, easy shout

Fans of XTRMNTR, do you not agree that there are a few very decent tracks on Evil Heat?

i think it's safe to attribute a very significant portion of what makes screamadelica great to weatherall but it's nowhere as easy to credit solely their outside collaborators for vanishing point & xtrmntr.

nowhere near as easy

one without a history of talking utter shite at every invitation

Really?

maybe i've missed a lot of Reid brothers blather in the last 30 years idk

For reasons that have little to do with the Reid brothers, here's the best interview JAMC ever gave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY4ZXpsoOUg

kinda feel that the JAMC's version of "My Girl", tossed off to fill a John Peel session, nails in 3 mins much of what BG has been trying to capture for decades.

Impressed by the turn out : there are more people on ILX now than I thought !

Because they care.

You win this round, boomers.

― pomenitul, Thursday, July 1, 2021 7:39 AM (forty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh is it the kids that love PS?

Thinking about this, I think there is a chance that someone under 30 miiiight recognise Loaded in the wild - but can’t think of one JAMC song that would evoke pissed up cheers of vague, intergenerationally osmotic recognition at a festival (say)

I was being facetious but the first time I (a millennial) heard Psychocandy it sounded positively dinosauric, whereas XTRMNTR was the future in audible action.

xp

my feelings about psychocandy and screamaledica were "I'm sure I would have liked this at the time but people have done these kind of things better haven't they"

I wouldn't want to give PS much credit for anything though, seems their best work is mostly down to outside collaborators & as a rock band they're worse than mediocre

i think it's fair to credit the majority of what made screamadelica good being down to outside collaborators, but way less so for vanishing point & xtrmntr

ufo otm

The actual recording membership of the band is so variable that reducing things to "outside collaborators" doesn't really sum up their situation. What Innes and Boaby want to do from year to year changes, and the people they get in to make the records with them are chosen to help realise that, whether or not those are the same people on the regular payroll. (The Orb and Weatherall versions of Higher Than The Sun, and the Jagz vs Chems versions of Swastika Eyes, are clearly the same songs).

yeah it varies, "loaded" and "come together" barely make any use of their original parts which is certainly an extreme of giving themselves over to their collaborators

while there's nothing on vanishing point or xtrmntr that goes that far, closest is probably "mbv arkestra (if they move kill 'em)" which is of course kevin shields remixing "if they move kill 'em"

vaguely relatedly, i still don't get why they put two different mixes of "swastika eyes" on the album

yeah rly, they don’t even have a different vibe like the two Highers

both Loaded and MBV Arkestra originally came out as b-side remixes ofc, and just ended up years later on the next album. Come Together sounds like different arrangements of the same song to me though, not as transformative a remix as those other two.

MBV Arkestra (first? also?) came out as a single, which I have a copy of: https://www.discogs.com/Primal-Scream-If-They-Move-Kill-Em-Darklands/release/223821

"Dedicated to Sam Peckinpah, John Coltrane, Ian Curtis and Rosa Luxemburg.

nice one Boab!

the album version of "come together" is weatherall's mix, which only uses one bit of the backing vocals from the original song (as heard on the single mix), bobby doesn't even appear. that counts as very transformative

Huh, and the B-side of that single is a Jesus & Mary Chain cover...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc4WIsgAVOI

I expected that cover to be bad but it was in fact good

hah yeah I'd forgotten that!

I guess it’s possible that Boab played “Darklands” when he was *in* the Mary Chain

using a confederate flag as the cover of your Memphis album, classic Bobby G move

have they ever talked about that album cover because it's just totally baffling and obviously bad

some kind of misguided pop art statement I would guess

It's a photo by William Eggleston whose work they also used on the Dixie-Narco EP. The photo is entitled 'Troubled Waters' iirc and is obviously far from being a Confederate celebration; whether that justifies a bunch of white guys from the UK plastering it all over their album cover is another matter.

The photo was also used as the cover for Stanley Booth's journalism collection Rhythm Oil, which I'm sure Gillespie has read.

I guess it's supposed to be "balanced" by the picture of Eddie Hazel on the reverse.

Using the entire photo and calling the album Troubled Waters, maybe... cropping the photo to just the confederate flag and then calling the album "Give Out But Don't Give Up" sends a big old "lost cause" message I'm sure they didn't want to send. I remember Bobby G talking reverentially about Black musicians of the American South at the time so I know he meant well.

Eggleston did the photo on Big Star’s Radio City. I’d imagine they were trying to channel that energy by using his work rather than any unconscious support for the Confederacy.

In many ways Bobby considers himself a black musician from the Deep South anyway (Deep South of Glasgow that is).

Go Tell it to Mount Florida

does it really matter where they got it from or what they thought they were doing with it

it's just yet another example of the fucked up racial politics of UK rock/indie and "talking reverentially about Black musicians of the American South" (while ripping off their music) is also part of that

(xp) Exactly, Florida's in the south isn't it?

I would assume JAMC dodged this particular bullet more by luck than judgement

No, I don't think they're anything like as dopey as Bob.

neither is Siouxsie Sioux, but that swastika shit sure didn't age well

They'd dropped all that prior to "Hong Kong Garden" though?

going by that recent interview, Bobby G's brain has actually aged far better than most of his peers'

Mmm, he's grown up a bit.

well tbf he has always instinctively understood that to cut through you must always speak in slogans and quotable bites

Bobby has a book to sell. It'll be The One Show next.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5TZpRHX0AsWI14?format=jpg

I should watch this, Bobby's bound to come out with some mean streets of Glasgow bullshit but, even better, they're surely going to ask him about the football!

i've never been depressed enough to take the final step and watch Sunday Brunch on purpose

Absolutely, never seen so much as a second of it but if it's good enough for Boab...

Bit early in the morning for Bob but, brace yourselves, he's on there to punt a concept album he has coming out about a failing relationship.

Are those celebrities? because I know none of them apart from boaby

You've never heard of dismally unfunny Irish comedienne and habitue of every shitty panel game going, Aisling Bea?

not really a fan of shitty panel shows

Neither am I, believe me.

Bobby was somewhat dry..

Has been for years.

A multitude of new box sets around Screamadelica, an unreleased Weatherall mix of "Shine like stars" amongst some 12" rereleases in a box, etc.

MBV Arkestra (first? also?) came out as a single

ah yeah I was misremembering which remix was on the A-side! (I had the 12") The general point stands tho.

the album version of "come together" is weatherall's mix, which only uses one bit of the backing vocals from the original song (as heard on the single mix), bobby doesn't even appear. that counts as very transformative

however the Come Together single is very very careful about being a double A! - discogs says even the runout groove has the Farley side as A² and Weatherall as A¹´², on both 7" and 12". I don't know if "the original song" as not remixed by anyone has ever been looks like the 20th anniversary box (ten years ago!) renamed the 7" mix to "Terry Farley 7" Mix" and included a "(7" Mix)" that's a five-minute version of the Weatherall mix, sooooo... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯