TS: Primal Scream vs The Jesus & Mary Chain

really tough decision as i love'em both for different reasons.
but cos of the brilliant production/noise/machine clashes throughout Vanishing Point, EchoDek, XTRMNTR, Evil Heat, More Light i am going with PS.
and yes, a lot of why i love PS is down to the collaborators/producers.

I guess with "Munki" and "Damage and Joy" I had gone past the need for them. Munkii had its moments, D&J didn't move me. Bit of a shame, I overenthusiastically bought one of those bundles, I did keep the cassette though.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

listening to "Accelerator" this morning, I realised I had no idea what the lyrics in the chorus were - "come on! you've lived too well" I thought maybe. Now, having looked them up, and watched Boaby sing them on the video while I listened carefully, I still can't believe it's "come on, come on, hit the accelerator, the accelerator".

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

This should have been considerably more lop-sided except for an ILX love for a plucky underdog.

i was unreasonably invested in the chain winning this

Genuinely surprised - Boaby is a gobshite idiot most of the time but the good PS albums are light years beyond the good JAMC albums. I have more respect for Jim and Willie but they rarely surprised me the way PS often did.

probably would’ve thrown a JAMC vote due to quality of the quantity of their work vs PS having some legit dreck and Gillespie being Gillespie.

XTRMNTR is still the best thing either put out and was my absolute most listened to thing of 2020.

Boaby is a gobshite idiot most of the time but the good PS albums are light years beyond the good JAMC albums.

otm

You win this round, boomers.

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!