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XTRMNTR

by Primal Scream

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Seldom is a band's sixth album their best, and Exterminator is nothing less than a radical new dawn. Only a few years before, Primal Scream seemed spent--a drug-addled joke, numbing the pain with the idle comfort of rock & roll cliché. Exterminator is their baptism by fire. An album with a righteous social conscience, it rages against apathy and injustice with all the funk-fueled indignation of Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On. Musically, Exterminator is bound by a coherence that has eluded them since 1991. From the tense industrial trance of "Swastika Eyes" to the scurvy-thin hip-hop of "Pills" and the exultant krautrock of "Shoot Speed Kill Light," one minute the Scream are diseased and desperate, the next they're basking in glorious, righteous euphoria. Thank the guests, certainly--the Chemical Brothers, New Order's Bernard Sumner, My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields--but when you hear Bobby Gillespie screaming "from here to where" on the hyperdistorted pedal-to-the-metal drag race of "Accelerator," you'll know he's the one with the road map to a terrific rock & roll future. --Louis Pattison