There are protest albums that take stabs at the administration or social situations, and a lot of punk albums that take a nihilistic stance toward such things, but XTRMNTR is one of those extreme cases that sees no solution apart from the total immolation of everything and everyone, to burn down the world and dance in the ruins. "Kill All Hippies" opens the album with ringing noise and static under a series of samples from the Dennis Hopper film Out of the Blue, a young teenage girl on a CB radio spouting anti-establishment jargon like 'subvert normality! Kill all hippies!' then the new face of Primal Scream rides in on rolling guitars, bass and synthesizer, the harder house sound of Vanishing Point honed to a knife-point and merged together with the messy Rolling Stones-influenced heavy rock of their earliest work, Bobby Gillespie crooning 'you got the money, I got the soul'. Then "Accelerator" blasts in, a fuzzy wailing army of guitars, Kevin Shields' Loveless approach applied to ballistic punk, howling vocals and a dozen guitars buried under feedback and static. This album means fucking business. The title track is mammoth, a punishing rhythm section rolling over a multitude of weird noises and Gillespie laying out the details of the destroyed, destitute world we're living in - 'exterminate the underclass', references to A Clockwork Orange and Bob Dylan. Throughout the album, the lyrics are filled with an obsession with insects and insecticide, diseases rampant and a new Nazi regime hiding under the guise of democracy, unmitigatedly angry, dark, confrontational shit. The only misstep is Gillespie's horrid attempt at rapping for the first part of "Pills" (redeemed by the vile spew of the closing section). The rest of the album is molten fucking gold, a vicious, syphilitic height they will likely never reach again. Ten years on from "Come Together" they returned to blow us apart, and not a moment too soon - ugly music for ugly times.
By: JShopa.