It's not totally impossible that sometime in the future, some intrepid soul might be able to sing a lyric like "there's no sun in the sky, no love in my life/ Since I lost my baby, all I do is cry" over mandolins and honky-tonk pianos and manage not to sound like a complete dipshit. But chances are that person isn't going to be a white middle-aged British ex-raver rockstar with a fake American accent and an affected garage-rock yelp.
Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie has made a career of stacking genres on top of each other into huge messy glorious piles of acid-house and krautrock and shoegaze and Stooges, and that approach has given us Screamadelica and Vanishing Point and XTRMNTR. But whenever he dips his toe into trad-rock formalism, that adventurous streak dries up right away and mutates into stifled reverence. 1994's Give Out But Don't Give Up was the first time he humped the desiccated corpse of garage-blues, and it resulted in Primal Scream's artistic nadir, but it had a certain horn-tinged exuberance and a couple of good hooks.
Riot City Blues, Gillespie's new trad-move, on the other hand, is flat and dead. It's as if Primal Scream have run completely out of ideas and so they've reverted to the detestable fallbacks of honking harmonicas and bar-band choogles, acting like college freshmen who just discovered blues.
"Nitty Gritty" is straight up circa-2003 garage-rock pastiche; it shoots for the Stones and ends up with the Datsuns. "Dolls" is a desperate grab for handclappy glam-rock stomp-sniff hedonism so forced and clumsy that it should be in a Sparks commercial. "Boogie Disease" includes the lyric "I'm the garbage man, I'm the garbage man/ Stick my fingers in your trashcan," which is especially ridiculous because everybody knows British people say "bin." The album is packed to the gills with empty signifiers: yelps and sneers and party-up exhortations, but it's so limp and defeated that it's impossible to hate; you just end up feeling sorry for it instead.
Even in its relatively ok moments, the album fails. The decent forbidding-throb bassline of "When the Bomb Drops" makes me feel bad for Scream bassist Mani, who has now been roped into the second retro-rock disaster of his career after already weathering the Stone Roses' Second Coming. "Country Girl" has a nice little guitar-and-mandolin bite that reminds me of Miranda Lambert's "Kerosene", but it just makes me wish I was listening to "Kerosine". And the six-and-a-half minute breathy monolithic psychedelic-flute drone of "Little Death" reminds me how welcome it is to have Espers around doing this sort of thing without all the cheesed-out garage-rock moans and sneers.
Primal Scream's last album, 2002's Evil Heat, wasn't great, but its scratchy blissed-out electro-clangs yielded a few powerful moments. Gillespie always manages to come up with something interesting when he errs toward hazy rave-casualty fuzz-bombs instead of the blooz-rawk yelps that not even Jack White can pull off properly anymore. After Riot City Blues, someone needs to point a Men In Black memory-eraser at him and make him forget the Mississippi Delta ever existed.
