Primal Scream – More Light review – a real return to form

Simon Poulter of What Would David Bowie Do? salutes the barnstorming return to form that is Primal Scream’s new album More Light

These are bleak and desperate times, people. We know this because we keep being told they are. As if the sight of increasingly vacant high streets, lengthening dole queues, a largely old Etonian government in Britain (run by “a pair of gay antique dealers”, according to Rich Hall) and Daft Punk recreating 1980s disco do not remind us.

Back in the 1980s, when things were last so bleak and desperate (increasingly vacant high streets, dole queues, old Etonian government run by a greengrocer’s daughter, Georgio Moroder blasting out of discos, as “clubs” were known, etc, etc) there were few truly erudite examples of the social and political zeitgeist captured, despite the actual agit-prop spirit of the times.

I would argue – but then I would – that The Specials’ Ghost Town, White Riot by The Clash or Weller’s Town Called Malice nailed it as good as any, though I still hold a candle for Robert Wyatt’s Shipbuilding (more about the Falklands than Thatcherite blight). There were well meaning protest organizations like Red Wedge, and Live Aid came along in the midst of the decade to shame us into giving up either what money we had, or the grotesque piles of it we were spending on pastel-shaded clothing.

And so it remains today. Thanks to the blandification of entertainment in general, no one is making a stand anymore. Now, this can be viewed as both bad and good. On the bad side, it seems that people seem to be accepting their fate and carrying on watching tripe reality shows featuring fame-hungry charlatans. On the good side, Sting has stopped writing curdled songs about Russian parents and Argentinian victims of human rights abuses, and trying to convince us that he actually gives a damn about coal mines being shut down.

When Bowie’s The Next Day came out of the blue to declare that a) The Dame was alive and b) He’s been reading the papers a lot, we were presented with his view of an imagined – but increasingly likely – dystopian future. Primal Scream have come along to something similar with their new album More Light, which shines a follow-spot on the dystopia of the present.

However, as with all Primal Scream records, don’t expect anything too deep. The lyrical legacies of Dylan and Woody Guthrie, even Springsteen’s take on the modern condition, are not under any recognisable threat. As we have grown used to with this band, More Light must be enjoyed at a relatively superficial level, i.e. whatever section of Bobby Gillespie’s vinyl record collection he has chosen to plunder this time. The result, by the way, is never bad. You just don’t want to get too involved in what he’s singing about.

As a lyricist, Gillespie has always been a great ex-drummer. The case for the prosecution stops with Exhibit 1A, m’lud, Rocks: “Dealers keep dealin’/Thieves keep thievin’/Whores keep whorin’/Junkies keep scorin’/Trade is on the meat rack/Strip joints full of hunchbacks/Bitches keep bitchin’/Clap keeps itchin’.”

Things haven’t improved much in ten years, if the nine-minute vibeout 2013 which kicks off More Light is anything to go by. It lays into modern Britain with well meaning, if slightly misappropriated venom, though it does make prescient references to the children of Thatcher’s heritage: “21st century slaves! A peasant underclass!”. Not exactly Shelley, but you get the point.

Removing 2013′s lyrical content from the equation, and letting the vocal simply become another instrument, it’s an impressive track, spread over an ambitious grandeur that mixes Middle Eastern brass with the chainsaw guitar of My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields. By its end you are left lacking any doubt that you have landed back on Planet Gillespie, in all that entails.

River Of Pain continues in the same dystopic vain, depicting a less than rosy domestic scene in which the drunken ‘Johnny’ (Gillespie’s stock character, you may have noticed…) who treats his lady ‘Susan’ like a punchbag, with a distinctly trippy sequence midway through the seven minute piece clearly representing a narcotic escape for one of them (replete with Beatle-esque psychedelia, a looped string sequence that reminds me of the intro to the Six Million Dollar Man theme music) before returning to a vibey Delta blues guitar riff and a sultry – and highly addictive – creeping undertrack.

If 2013 risks going down the route of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire by featuring a long list of cultural references, Culturecide walks even more awkwardly towards an attempted drive-by rapping that includes mention of the neutron bomb.

Perhaps it’s simply that “neutron bomb” scans well and has so many potential rhyming partners, but no two words annoy me more as a lyrical prop. In songs from artists as varied as Pearl Jam and UB40 (who managed to rhyme it with “Pentagon”), it’s lyrical inclusion has always made as much sense as anyone in a TV show feverishly hacking away at a computer keyboard when there is a perfectly serviceable mouse on the very same desk.

Anyway, back to the record, and a return to the Mount Florida estates of Gillespie’s native Glasgow with Tenement Kid, a bass-driven jazz-dub that paints a non-too-subtle picture of disaffected youth in the urban jungle of 21st century Britain. On Invisible City there’s a touch of latter day Bowie, with its grinding guitar intro and brassy chorus, while Sideman could easily have appeared on The Next Day. Indeed, the two albums share many common themes, though, sadly not the same degree of wordsmith dexterity as mastered by Bowie on his release.

If there’s one thing about More Light that sets it apart from almost anything else out there it’s the disparate directions Primal Scream move about the record in. Goodbye Johnny (yep, him again) bops along with a noirish swing before introducing a delightfully retro-King Curtis saxophone lead.

That the Primals have access to well-thumbed collections of vintage vinyl has never been in doubt, as the obvious Stones nods of Rocks and Country Girl generously demonstrated. More Light does open up the record cabinet a little wider, with Elimination Blues – featuring no less than Robert Plant and black-chick backing vocals – actually sounding like a song Plant might have easily recorded in his exploration of American roots. It’s also one of the most satisfying tracks on the album, with its pumping, looping bass and sweaty late night blues.

Be warned, however, when you reach the final track of the ‘regular’ version of More Light (the deluxe version contains an extra six songs). Because, if you’re British, you may be alarmed by the title It’s Alright It’s OK. Thankfully it is not the theme song to TV’s ‘light hearted’ crime series New Tricks, the one for which Dennis Waterman “writes da feem toon and sings da feem toon”, as Little Britain helpfully pointed out he does tend to do.

Thankfully, too, Primal Scream’s It’s Alright It’s OK is not in the same vein as its chirpy, postman-friendly counterpart. Instead, it is a truly uplifting return to the happy-clappy gospel vibe of Movin’ On Up, filching The Faces’ “Ooh-la-la” hook in the process to produce a song as reassuringly ‘up’ as the lyrical premise of 2013 was a dour reminder of just how bleak these times are.

Lyrics aside, More Light is a return to strength for the Primals after their disappointing Beautiful Future five years ago. Produced by David Holmes, the northern Irish DJ responsible for one of my favourite film soundtracks, Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, there is a warm intimacy to this album than anything Primal Scream have ever produced before. Thanks to Holmes, it is less of a basement recording and more of an upmarket loft apartment of a record. The edge is there (and Shields’ guitar plays a large part in that), but so is a more measured cocktail of the band’s obvious love of vintage sounds, and a newer, more innovative approach to making music. Just don’t listen too deeply to the words…

Article originally published here.

A tribute to the king of album sleeve designs – Storm Thorgerson

Simon Poulter of What Would David Bowie Do? remembers a brilliant designer.

If you were to ask me to make a list of the greatest albums of all time, I could start now and probably never finish. Magazines and radio stations regularly try to give it a go, but rarely come up with a top 10, top 100 or even top 100 that will truly cover things adequately.

You might, however, stand a chance of coming up with a decent list of the greatest albums based on their cover art.

From Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to London Calling, album covers were an integral part of the record buying experience in the pre-CD era.

With the 2013 Record Store Day taking place throughout the world tomorrow, you won’t have to go far to hear old heads – like me – ruing the disappearance of gatefold sleeves, of liner notes and lyrics, and the whole tactility of buying music in a physical format.

As a schoolboy, album art meant as much to me as the music contained within. Dull geography lessons on Upper Volta would pass more meaningfully while recreating band logos in biro on the cover of an exercise book. Entire band back catalogues could be filed and discussed according to their sleeve art, while no adolescent male could resist a sneaky peak at Roxy Music’s Country Life while perusing the record racks on a Saturday afternoon.

Some covers – and more pertinently, their designers – became synonymous with the impact of the album’s musical content. Barney Bubbles was the creative force behind Stiff Records during the New Wave, while further back, Roger Dean’s elaborate fantasyscapes will be forever associated with Yes.

Storm and the Floyd

But, perhaps, the most inventive and iconic cover art designer of them all was Storm Thorgerson, who died yesterday from cancer at the age of 69.

He is mostly associated with Pink Floyd, but together with Hipgnosis, the design collective he co-founded in 1968, Thorgerson was responsible for designing covers for 10CC, Muse, Led Zeppelin, Audioslave, The Cranberries, Peter Gabriel, Black Sabbath, Ian Dury, Steve Miller and Genesis.

Growing up in Cambridge, Thorgerson was a childhood friend of eventual Floyd members Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and David Gilmour. “We first met in our early teens,” Gilmour wrote yesterday on his website. “We would gather at Sheep’s Green, a spot by the river in Cambridge and Storm would always be there holding forth, making the most noise, bursting with ideas and enthusiasm. Nothing has ever really changed. He has been a constant force in my life, both at work and in private, a shoulder to cry on and a great friend.”

In 1968 Thorgerson and fellow Cambridge designer Aubrey Powell were asked by the Floyd to design the cover for A Saucer Full Of Secrets. It was to seal Thorgerson’s association with the band forever: “The artworks that [Storm] created for Pink Floyd from 1968 to the present day have been an inseparable part of our work,” Gilmour added in his online tribute.

Dark Side Of The Moon

In 1973 the band released Dark Side Of The Moon, for which Thorgerson came up with a cover design as iconic as the record itself. It’s origins were pretty functional: the band’s Rick Wright had suggested Thorgerson came up with something simple and straightforward. The outcome is something so straightforward and simple that it has adorned T-shirts and posters for the last 40 years

“No amount of cajoling would get them to consider any other contender, nor endure further explanation of the prism, or how exactly it might look,” Thorgerson has explained. “‘That’s it’, they said in unison, we got to get back to real work, and returned forthwith to the [Abbey Road] studio upstairs.”

“The refracting glass prism referred to Floyd light shows – consummate use of light in the concert setting. Its outline is triangular and triangles are symbols of ambition, and are redolent of pyramids, both cosmic and mad in equal measure, all these ideas touching on themes in the lyrics. The joining of the spectrum extending round the back cover and across the gatefold inside was seamless like the seguing tracks on the album, whilst the opening heartbeat was represented by a repeating blip in one of the colours.”

Throughout Thorgerson’s work, artistic influences can be easily identified, from Picasso to Magritte, but also plenty of humour. With the Floyd’s Animals, Thorgerson created another icon, with a pig famously flying over Battersea Power Station.

The shot has now passed into lore thanks to the inflatable pig used for the photograph slipping its mooring and drifting off into the incoming flight path for Heathrow Airport.

Other work

As the 1970s unfolded, and conceptual cover art became increasingly intertwined with musical narrative, Hipgnosis expanded their client roster to include other bands, and notably those on the artier side of rock, like Genesis and 10CC.

The studio also picked up Black Sabbath’s Technical Ecstasy, the cover of which was once described eloquently by Ozzy Osbourne as “two robots screwing on an escalator”

More often than not covers were conceptual interpretations rather than literal representations, eschewing the pop notion that albums should be adverts for the bands, featuring the members themselves.

Through Thorgerson’s work with Pink Floyd, however, notable design cues emerged that would appear in his work for other acts. Anonymity played a major part. Even with albums like Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, …And Then There Were Three by Genesis, and jazz-rockers Brand-X’s Moroccan Roll (my favourite album title ever), which feature photography of people, they are never in close-up. Faces are never clear and in several cases feature figures with their backs to the camera.

Distance is always significant, something Thorgerson’s work shared with Floyd’s Roger Waters, who became increasingly obsessed with absence and separation, culminating in the entire narrative of The Wall. Thorgerson returned to Water’s feelings with the cover for Is There Anybody Out There?, the box set of the live Wall show, which simply features the four face masks worn by the fake Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason at the beginning of the ambitious show.

One dominant cue throughout Thorgerson’s projects has been the prominence of flat, green grassy fields in the lower half of the cover, blue sky in the upper half, and a prominent object or objects in the immediate foreground.

Grantchester Meadows

Perhaps inspired by Grantchester Meadows in Cambridge (immortalised by Floyd on Ummagumma), Thorgerson returned to this device again and again, on everything from Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother and The Division Bell through to Biffy Clyro’s single God & Satan and Synrise by obscure Belgian electro band Goose. Along with the setting, Thorgerson’s photography would often have an unreal reality about it – rich greens in the grass, bold blues in the skyscapes, and an unnerving clarity of objects in the fore.

“I listen to the music, read the lyrics, speak to the musicians as much as possible,” Thorgerson has explained. “I see myself as a kind of translator, translating an audio event – the music – into a visual event – the cover. I like to explore ambiguity and contradiction, to be upsetting but gently so. I use real elements in unreal ways.”

As albums have become reduced to bitstreams, and music consumption shifts from having the patience to listen to two or even four sides of vinyl to downloaded singles or Spotify mixes, Thorgerson’s artistry is, sadly, diminishing.

There are still, thankfully, champions of the art of record design, who regard the packaging and presentation of their music as more than just a marketing exercise, and who look to today’s multiple formats as an opportunity for renewed design creativity.

But with Storm Thorgerson’s passing, we should mourn the death of an era when the album cover meant more than just the thing that stops your record from getting scratched.

Article originally published here.