Primal Scream: Evil Heat

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * )

For a band that risked a narcotic-induced meltdown for much of the 90s, you've got to give Primal Scream marks for consistency and continued sense of purpose.

While their seventh album overall, this feels like an extension of their two previous offerings - Vanishing Point and Exterminator. As with those, here the British group are filtering their right-on influences, their rock'n'roll aggression and sloganeering songs through the sonic-warp treatment of various mixers, most notably Scream part-timer Kevin Shields (of My Bloody Valentine fame) and Andrew Weatherall (who was behind the desk on their 1991 breakthrough Screamadelica).

The result is largely a thrilling blast of an album shooting some very bright sparks off the friction of the white-noise rock and crackling electronica.

The latter comes partly on the twiddlings of Weatherall on the Kraftwerk (strained through New Order) homage Autobahn 66 and The Lord is My Shotgun, a swampy electro-blues reminiscent of Iggy Pop's Nightclubbing, featuring one Robert Plant on lung-crippling harmonica.

True, they've been down this way before - and occasionally you can't but wonder if Primal Scream's attempts at "electronic garage-band future rock'n'roll" make them sound just a little dated. And that's without considering the cover of Lee Hazelwood-Nancy Sinatra's Some Velvet Morning that Bobby Gillespie performs with Kate Moss (which curiously didn't make the review copy).

Or a track originally entitled Bomb the Pentagon which got a hasty rewrite into the still rabble-rousing, bass-throbbing Rise, which does its best to start a revival of interest in the influence of John Lydon's PiL.

Likewise, the Detroit invokes the hacksaw keyboards of Suicide (or even Dunedin's own Snapper) with Jim Reid on guest vocal sneer.

In the end - after the Velvet Underground thrash of Skull X, the ambient gospel of Space Blues

2 - it all ends up sounding like a Primal Scream album. A blast from the past in places, but still quite a blast.

Label: Columbia