Primal Scream

After the disappointing Give Out, But Don't Give Up, the Scream team brought in Mani from the Stone Roses to help them do what they do best: groove. The result is a dark, enigmatic and exceptionally heavy record that was a welcomed hangover after the moonshine drunk from its slap-happy predecessor. Reggae god Augustus Pablo loans his haunting melodica to "Star."

Yes, Virginia, there were rock & roll-meets-club culture collisions before the electronica
boomlet. Take Primal Scream's 1991 masterpiece, Screamadelica, a soulful, druggy
expansion of rock's possibilities – the Odelay of its time, perhaps, but where Beck digs Bob
Dylan and the Beasties, Primal Scream leadman Bobby Gillespie looked to Al Green and the
Stones. Those influences dominated Primal Scream's 1994 retrojammy Give Out b... More >

As someone who saw the title film stoned in 1971, and loved it, I agree that this is one of the few putatively psychedelic albums ever to evoke the distractible ecstasy of actual psychedelic experience, flitting from detail to fascinating, ultimately meaningless detail. Crucially, the moods and referents that flash past are anchored by tunes and sounds so simple a zonked zombie can relate to them. But as someone not altogether dismissive of the cofeature, Panic in Needle Park (Charles Theater on Avenue B, you could look it up), I must also note that, pace the highly apposite Stones rip that takes the trip back to earth, "medication" has never killed a hole that didn't come back gaping the next morning--a corny truth that renders this an achievement best admired from a sane distance. (Grade - B+)