| After peddling fey indie-pop in the mid-Eighties, Bobby Gillespie's Primal Scream took a quantum, inspired leap with the Andy Weatherall and Terry Farley-produced Screamadelica, which melds the trippy, blissed-out ethos of acid rock with its more rhythm and sample oriented late Eighties counterpart, acid house. Screamadelica is a meeting of supposedly hostile genres, like American and Russian astronauts docking together in orbit--a musical marriage made in space. All of the elements on Screamadelica--piano, samples, gospel singers, dub-drenched rhythms--float about weightlessly amidst one another, as if beyond gravity's pull. And gliding above it all is Gillespie himself, at best on "Higher Than The Sun", vocals at once ecstatic and wistful, staring down at a world that's yet to catch up with where he's at. In time, Screamadelica would come to be regarded as one of the defining albums of its era. --David Stubbs |
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