Music Ally

UK music service We7 has kicked off a new promotion where music bloggers nominate their most underrated albums of all-time.

We’re taking part, and our two nominations both fall into the rawk category: Primal Scream’s Give Out But Don’t Give Up, and the Black Crowes’ Amorica.

I should stress that this is me (Stuart) writing – these albums are probably hugely underrated by everyone else in the Music Ally office, so it’s only fair to point that out.

Anyway, Give Out But Don’t Give Up…

Looking back, it’s easy to see why people who’d gone mad for Screamadelica were a bit flummoxed by it. The Scream had gone from being trippy acid-house crossover stars to… well, essentially they’d become the Rolling Stones.

Yet they were bloody good at it. The album kicks off with Rocks – still one of THE most guaranteed dancefloor-fillers – followed by Jailbird’s ace riffing and call-and-response chorus, followed by beautiful booze-soaked ballad Cry Myself Blind. And then George Clinton turns up…

Actually, while Rocks and Jailbird are the party tracks, it’s the ballads on Give out But Don’t Give Up that make it a classic in my view. Everybody Needs Somebody and I’ll Be There For You might be Stones-squared, but to me they sound just as timeless.

Funnily, around the time of Give Out But Don’t Give Up’s release, Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson gave an angry interview to the NME (I think, it could have been Melody Maker) railing about how the Scream had nicked his band’s sound.

He had a slight point, although given that both were mining the same 70s Southern rawk / Stones influences, the accusation didn’t carry much weight.

This was just as the Crowes were about to release Amorica, which might unkindly be described as the album where they stopped being one of the biggest bands in the world, and started the process of becoming a jam-band with a slowly-diminishing relevance outside their hardcore followers.

Still, Amorica is my favourite Crowes album, even more than its multimillion-selling predecessors Shake Your Money Maker and The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion. Partly because I saw them for the first time on the Amorica tour, giddy with excitement (well, giddy with the fumes of an Albert Hall full of Crowes fans smoking strange-looking roll-up cigarettes, anyway).

But it’s also because the album sounds so tight and together – ironically, given the entertaining stories of brotherly disputes that hampered its recording (one Robinson recording his parts in the studio, then the other coming in and wiping them, etc etc).

The ballads, again, are a big part of it. Ballad In Urgency followed by Wiser Time is a beautiful combination, especially as the former segues into the latter with a piano coda – a coda that I’ve seen stretched out to a good 20 minutes plus of soloing at numerous live gigs in the years since. I’m not sure that’s a selling point, mind, but the two songs are proper classics.

There are tight, poppy tracks too, like A Conspiracy and High Head Blues, as well as the marvellously rootsy Downtown Money Waster. But my favourite track is She Gave Good Sunflower, which locks into a groove that never fails to cheer me up.

I find it very hard to write about music, as opposed to writing about the music industry or technology, so I’m not sure I’ve done a good job in putting their merits across.

But they’re both examples of albums that are often seen as going off the rails (creatively in the Scream’s case, commercially in the Crowes’), but which have actually remained the favourites of this particular fan.

You can read about the other nominated albums here, and cast your votes for which is the most underrated here.

Tags: black crowes, primal scream

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Digital Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.