Primal Scream: Give Out But Don’t Give Up—The Original Memphis Recordings

For many listeners, Primal Scream made two albums essential to their respective era—1991’s Screamadelica and 2000’s XTRMNTR—and has otherwise made entertaining if not especially distinctive records that don’t always transcend their influences. But the band’s lesser-known catalog deserves to be reevaluated. The albums between their two acknowledged classics, 1994’s Give Out but Don’t Give Up and 1997’s Vanishing Point, constitute essential stepping stones in the band’s trajectory, one that helps to explain how they managed to make one of the most crucial albums of the early ‘90s and a similarly pivotal (and still underrated) album in the early ‘00s. This new release of original recordings from the Give Out but Don’t Give Up sessions is here to set the record straight.

This release offers the original demos recorded for the album in Memphis with the celebrated Muscle Shoals rhythm section before a new producer reworked the tracks. The gambit, then, is to present the world with the album that could have been. The question is, do these original recordings make us wish they had been released instead of the official album tracks?

As is apparent on the single “Rocks,” the Memphis recordings have a warmer, more soulful, less radio-ready sound. Rather than coming on like a British Black Crowes, as on the album version, Primal Scream in their Memphis incarnation sound a bit more themselves, less taken with mainstream aspirations and instead questing for a different kind of ecstatic sound, as they had achieved with different stylistic directions on earlier records.

On the Stones-like “I’m Gonna Cry Myself Blind,” for example, the Memphis version sounds far more blissed-out, tinging the despair with a kind of willful abandon. In general, Gillespie’s vocal takes are rawer and airier on the Memphis recordings. Even on “Everybody Needs Somebody” or “Jesus,” the Memphis version of “I’ll Be There for You” (arguably some of the better vocals on the album), the Memphis vocals, though more demo-like, have much more edge.

Though it is true that the arrangements are not drastically different, there is an overall mood—hard to put into words, but quite palpable nonetheless—that makes this set of recordings feel far more special than the original album, which was overproduced and mastered for the radio more than an intimate setting. That release has not aged well and can sound a bit generic. It’s version of “Big Jet Plane” is a solid piece of dreamy Southern rock, but on the Memphis recordings it soars like gospel, with far greater nuance in the horn arrangements and in general more dynamic. Where the album versions of these songs at times risks sounding like Primal Scream-aping predecessors, the Memphis recordings do greater justice to the band’s originality. The official release of Give Out but Don’t Give Up might be good for a party or a drive to the beach, but the Memphis recordings will take you to church. And for that reason, its release is a triumph—you won’t hear these songs the same way again.