Firing up a Primal Scream album post-XTRMNTR is merely a guessing game of which band or genre they are going to riff on. For their works post-Screamadelica, a Southern, Americanised twang got in the way of lengthy and dismissive instrumental sections. The trouble for Bobby Gillespie and the rest of the group is knowing when to call a song, understanding at what point it needs to end. That is their great difficulty, and though it may occur frequently, especially on Riot City Blues, there are those who like it. A blur of that Mick Jagger vocal style and the Mumford and Sons instrumental style is bound to hit somewhere. Beautiful instruments and a strong voice, the main and inevitable features on Riot City Blues, though most of it independent of one another. Primal Scream struggles to piece those highs together.
Punchy thrills are soon upon us. After a sluggish start with Country Girls and Nitty Gritty, the whiny Gillespie style finds some welcome backing. Rosary bead violence and an alternative rock thrill. It feels genuine but that feeling is undone by the “alright” interjection, the constant spillover into being a band, replicating the success the Stones had with their works decades ago, runs rampant throughout this Primal Scream effort. A real shame, too, since the band has some wonderful ideas of their own – the cultural observations made by Gillespie and the Americanised trajectory of their sound would land that much better without the shadowing of another, better band. You can hear the results of Primal Scream’s independence on When the Bomb Drops, a wonderfully strong piece of work which stands out because it does not hide away behind other tones of the genre already rolled out by stronger artists. In parody, there is respect, but in replication, there is fear. Primal Scream is in the latter camp and loses their venomous edge here.
Riot City Blues does, at times, ooze the coolness Primal Scream is gunning for. They manage a convincing showcase of it on Little Death, relying solely on the instrumental skills of the band rather than the Jagger impersonations heard earlier. Wordplay and interjections profile Gillespie as a writer reliant on his subconscious rather than the sense his words may make. There is an out-there wildness to Riot City Blues, which is not tapped in as much as it should be. There are moments, though, which showcase how thrilling it could have been had the focus been for dances with death. Gillespie writes well of those moments, and it comes through, however briefly, on Little Death. Country boogie sounds absorb Riot City Blues soon after, and the album becomes a thoroughly fun time.
Groovy drug interplay and a desire to jump along with the roaring riffs heard on The 99th Floor is a well-earned thrill ride from Primal Scream. The tricky part of Riot City Blues, as is the case with many of Primal Scream’s albums, is that they sound like caricatures of a better artist. They never escape from that shadow, and without sunlight, without growth of their unique tinge of sound, there is little. Riot City Blues is solid fun even when it adapts the weakest parts of Jagger’s writing style, the old blues sound without the old blues heart. Sparse highlights are better than most Primal Scream albums, and for Riot City Blues, it is refreshing to hear the band cut back on the instrumental excess to at least find a few new flavours of their sound, too.
