......The penultimate track on the new Primal Scream album is called "Shoot Speed/Kill Light". If everything from the implied subject matter to the punctuation reminds you of the Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat", you're well on the way to understanding what this record's all about. Like White Light/White Heat, the Velvet's second album, XTRMNTR is eclectic and cantankerous, steeped in sonic and emotional extremes, and above all, dark. The two records also share a certain off-hand, self-indulgent quality that makes them less than compulsively listenable -- intriguing, perhaps, but neither group's final hour. The VU record at least had the advantage of being groundbreaking, while XTRMNTR simply sounds patched together. Like its spiritual predecessor, though, it also has the virtue of being an interesting failure

......XTRMNTR -- or perhaps it's called Exterminator; it's difficult to tell -- is in fact a pastiche of musical cross references to the early Velvets and the three decades worth of moody, noisy, druggy rock that have followed in their footsteps. Overt echos of Joy Division, New Order, the Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine resonate throughout the tracksÉ which is not surprising at all, considering that the extended guest list here includes Joy Division/New Order's Bernard Sumner and MBV's Kevin Shields, and that Primal Scream frontman Bobbie Gillespie began his musical career as the drummer on The Jesus and Mary Chain's classic (moody, noisy, druggy) debut Psychocandy. Also on the guest list are electronic godheads David Holmes and the Chemical Brothers, among others, providing some shiny modern beats to keep the proceedings up to date.

......If you're having trouble figuring out how Gillespie managed to put this superstar roster together, or why you should even care about a new Primal Scream record, a little history is in order. Primal Scream occupies a high niche in the pantheon of '90's rock history, but they've logged as much time embarrassing themselves as innovating. Bobbie Gillespie formed the original band while still drumming for the J&MC, but they first came to prominence with their 1990 hit "Loaded", one of the earlier successful rock-dance fusions. You remember it: the loose piano groove coupled with Peter Fonda's sampled voice declaring "We wanna be FREE, to do what we wanna DO"? Seeming destined for one-hit wonder status, Primal Scream instead surprisingly followed the single with Screamadelica, an album of such scope and inventiveness that, despite being more than a little scattershot, is rightly considered a classic. An eclectic stew of roots rock, dub, dance grooves and psychedelia, it's one of the best and most influential records to come out of the English dance-rock scene that spawned that likes of the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays.

......And then, like most of their baggy-trousered brethren, they blew it all on drugs and a lousy follow-up album. Primal Scream's was in fact one of the worst of the crop: 1994's Give Out But Don't Give Up was a flaccid set of Stones- and Skynyrd-inflected "roots rock" that would've embarassed the Black Crowes (hell, it even has a Confederate flag on the cover!) and all but consigned Primal Scream to deserved obscurity. So it was a shock to hear them, two years later, contribute the instrumental theme to the movie Trainspotting, and even more of a shock that it was so damned great -- a groovy, spooky mood piece that put the "trip" back in "trip hop". They returned the next year, having salvaged bassist Gary Mounfield from the ruins of the Stone Roses, and released the largely ignored, staggeringly terrific Vanishing Point, probably the finest psychedelic record of the decade -- a percolating set of grooves that was equal parts hi-tech and lo-fi. A lot of records released in 1997 were laden with twitchy moogs, B-3's, sitars and computer voices, but nowhere were they deployed as artfully as on Vanishing Point. You probably never heard it, but you did get a taste of it; the instrumentals on the record were endlessly recycled on TV ads and in movie trailers, just like everything on Moby's Go has been this year.

......The record, at least in America, sank without a trace, and Primal Scream was unceremoniously bounced from its stateside label.

......Maybe Gillespie took it all personally. That would begin to account for the fierce desolation of the new record, which has now arrived on Astralwerks. The way Primal Scream has deepened the shadows on XTRMNTR recalls, in some ways, the gothic twist Massive Atrack added to its recent and brilliant Mezzanine. The difference, though is that where Massive folded the Velvets quotes, Cure samples and Liz Frasier vocals into its own seductive grooves seamlessly and elegantly, Primal Scream too often elect to flat-out imitate their inspiration.

......That's not all bad, and it results in some impressive feats of production trickery. "Accelerator" is pounding, driving Stooges- style rave-up wherein not only the slashing guitars but the drums, loops, shrieking sirens, and eventually the whole damned song are overdriven to the point of meltdown in a way rarely heard outside of "Sister Ray" (or, um, Psychocandy). By contrast, the invigorating "Shoot Speed/Kill Light" is compressed into tinny waves of guitar and not-bass just like the early New Order track it so desperately wants to be. Elsewhere, there are long stretches of stoned near-free-jazz that tend to overstay their welcome and derail the record's momentum. Pounding beats and fuzz bass dominate the funkier tracks, and in places the music even skews toward house. Basically, there's not a chance in hell that all of this is going to amount to any form of cohesive whole; in that sense, XTRMNTR hearkens back to the eclectic stew of Screamadelica, although its vibe couldn't possibly be further from the joyous abandon of that earlier collection.

......In its neutral mode, the record perhaps most closely resembles the dark psych-goth-dance fusion of last year's Death in Vegas record, to which Gillespie contributed a vocal in the form of a sideways rewrite of Bob Dylan's "Tombstone Blues". He dusts off his Dylan again on XTRMNTR, dropping a bit of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" into "Exterminator", although it's not clear what he has in mind, In fact, most of the time it's pretty hard to determine what Gillespie's on about here. To judge from the miltitary-industrial-complex artwork, he's downright upset about war and injustice, but who's to say what exactly is going on in the inscrutable political screeds of "Exterminator" and "Swastika Eyes", other than that the latter sounds uncomfortably similar to last year's Chemical Brothers/Bernard Sumner collaboration "Out of Control", especially when the Brothers tweak the knobs on the remix? "I believe in forgiveness / Hate will eat you whole", Gillespie croons on the uncharacteristically gentle linn-drum ballad "Keep Your Dreams". Well, sure, I'll buy that, but it doesn't sit comfortably next to a track called "Kill All Hippies", or the record's absolute low point, a jilted-lover white rap called "Pills". The singer's endlessly looped howls of "You're a SICKÉ FUCK!" can't help but evoke -- unintentionally, one hopes -- Fred Durst whining about feeling like a chump, hey.

......These infantile flourishes notwithstanding, Primal Scream's creepshow is at least more compelling than, for example, Marilyn Manson's, and a lot of this stuff actually sounds pretty good on its own merits. The real problem is the haphazard way it's assembled. It feels more like a collection of singles, b-sides and remixes than a real album. "Swastika Eyes" appears twice in not-that-different mixes, seemingly randomly scattered in the sequence as tracks 4 and 10. Also apparently dumped arbitrarily onto the album is a Kevin Shields remix of "If They Move, Kill ÔEm" from Vanishing Point, which, although substantially reworked and retitled "MBV Arkestra", is neither particularly good My Bloody Valentine nor especially inspired Primal Scream.

......What makes Primal Scream worth paying attention to, even on an off day, is that they have good taste in precisely the way the current wave of rock-dance fusionists don't. Trying to make a version of White Light/White Heat that you can dance to is simply a more noble goal than welding weak-ass raps onto Sabbath riffs, as is all the rage. Chalk that up in part to the fact that Primal Scream has been practicing this kind of hybridization for over a decade if you will, but it also has something to do with the band having a sense of their position in the lineage of underground rock.

......If they wanted to make a brooding , aggravating record, at least they've gone to the right sources. It shows in the persistent Velvet-isms, and most particularly in the two tracks that close the record: the soaring, Kevin Shields-produced "Shoot Speed", which is the best My Bloody Valentine tune to never be on a My Bloody Valentine record, and the pulsating "I'm Five Years Ahead of My Time". While the title of the latter suggests that the Scream may be touting their own reputation for musical prescience -- and who could blame them? -- it's actually a cover of an obscure 1967 pysch-trash classic by the Third Bardo, a poker-faced in-joke not unlike their 1991 reconstruction of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators' "Slip Inside This House". Everything new is old again, again. Prima Scream isn't ahead of their time this year, but, historically speaking, it just wouldn't do to write them off just yet.

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