It's seldom that a band's sixth album is their best, but Exterminator is nothing less than a radical new dawn. Only a few years before, Primal Scream seemed spent--a smack-addled joke, numbing the pain with the idle comfort of rock & roll cliché. Exterminator is the Scream's baptism of fire--an album with a righteous social conscience, it rages against apathy and injustice with all the funk-fuelled indignation of Sly & The Family Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On. Musically, too, Exterminator is shackled together with a coherence that's 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 hyper-distorted 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
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