Vanishing Point

by

Primal Scream

Edit

The biggest problem with Vanishing Point is that it doesn't really maintain a consistent tone. It starts off with an excursion into electronic dub, slowly developing a somewhat dark and moody feel. But then, on track four, it throws you a really earnest, folksy acoustic ballad that expresses reverence for civil rights icons, sounding like the Manic Street Preachers at their least vital. I can applaud the sentiment, but this sounds really out of place after you've been working hard to create a sense of menace.

On the second side, it gets even worse. Primal Scream have always been goofy Stones revivalists at heart (they just have exceptional taste in dance music), but the band's landmark albums Screamadelica and XTRMNTR both find ways to incorporate that tendency into electronic music so it doesn't stand out too much. But "Medication" is a completely unadorned straight-ahead attempt at blues-rock, and it sounds very repetitive and boring. What's worse, it is immediately followed by a Motorhead cover. I have nothing against Motorhead, but Bobby Gillespie has the wrong voice for any kind of swaggering hard rock. It makes him sound weak and straining.

This is all a bit easier to take if you remember that the band's goal is to create an alternate soundtrack to the movie Vanishing Point. In that context, the sudden use of sixties-style folk is more understandable. If you view the protracted, long jams in the dub songs as a stoned road movie soundtrack, it makes more sense. The electronic songs "Out Of The Void" and "Stuka" are unremarkable musically, but they do have a sort of trippy vibe. Still, it's not really first-rate material.

Perhaps it would be easier to just enumerate the good parts. The first three songs are pretty good. "Burning Wheel" has Gillespie singing about something or other in a detached manner, accompanied by a reverberating guitar line. The song takes a really long time to get off the ground, but it sets the tone for a freaky dub album. "Get Duffy" is a fine instrumental. It has a jam-like quality, but the rhythm is funky and enjoyable. This leads into the excellent "Kowalski," which rips off the bass line from Massive Attack's "Safe From Harm" (hey, steal from the best) and lays some sampled dialogue and droning guitar over it. The hoarse, rhythmic whisper repeating "Kowalski, vanishing point" is oddly effective.

The dub-jam sound comes back a couple more times. "If They Move Kill 'Em" uses a really neat dub echo as the lead. The guitar line that counters the lead seems a bit incongruous, but does the stoned seventies thing well enough. Personally, I prefer Kevin Shields' incredible deconstruction of this track on XTRMNTR, which is much harsher, trippier, and simultaneously more danceable. However, the original does occasionally emphasize a funk-keyboard backdrop that is quite appealing. Toward the end, "Trainspotting" is basically another long jam with electronic effects, and it's all right, though not particularly memorable.

Whether you like this album or not will heavily depend on how much the idea of a bunch of meandering dub jams for a road movie suits your mood. I have a lot of trouble listening to the whole album most of the time (and I gave it many chances), but once in a while I hit a mood where this sort of half-focused, lazy, vaguely weird music sounds pretty good, when neither of the focused, well-defined tones of Screamadelica and XTRMNTR seems to be quite what I'm looking for. In that setting, Vanishing Point might be just the thing ("Kowalski" definitely gets some momentum going), but even then, I sort of have to force myself to ignore the blues-rock detours. I'd suggest leaving this one for after you become acquainted with the band's two most famous albums.