Music Day 2: Primal Scream

I’ve long been of the mind that Primal Scream’s 2000 effort, XTRMNTR, was a victim of self-sabotage by the band. The disc’s first half marks some of the fiercest and most, well, primal music the band ever put down. The second half, however, faded just a touch. My cockamamie theory is that if Primal Scream had maintained that level of intensity from start to finish, it might have turned out like Monty Python’s skit about the world’s deadliest joke: Anyone who heard it would die. That effect thankfully doesn’t carry over to their live show, which was a relentless assault of rock groove. Couched at the end of the Cedar Street Courtyard, which is pretty much a wide alleyway with a bar at the back, Primal Scream hardly acted like they were trapped or cornered. After getting off to a strong start, technical difficulties brought them to a stop (with the band vamping through the Jackson 5’s “ABC” and singer Bobby Gillespie offering the crowd some thick-accented banter that needed subtitles while things got fixed). After that, they raised the intensity song by song, until they had the crowd going out of their minds by the time they got to “Swastika Eyes” and “Rocks”.