- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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FilterThis is the band's most cohesive, accessible, melodic and lyrically viscous record to date. [#21, p.99]
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Entertainment WeeklySounds like a collection of Exile on Main Street outtakes--and often good ones at that. [25 Aug 2006, p.86]
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Stupid, clichéd, utterly ridiculous for sure, but done with so much pizazz that you can't help but fall for its charms.
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It's all done with such snarling, adrenalised gusto that it proves irresistible.
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UncutIt's dumb, downhome fun, and deliberately gizmo-free. [Jul 2006, p.86]
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This album is just a purer distillation, a more joyous exaggeration of the smaller, more tasteful thrills offered by every posturing indie rock band out there.
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New Musical Express (NME)At its best 'Riot City Blues' is dumb, fun and silly. [3 Jun 2006, p.33]
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Listened to with an open mind, it's a refreshingly retro rock & roll album that uses its waste-oid imagination in capturing every fantasy that entered Bobby Gillespie's teenage mind.
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MojoThough it's certainly refreshing after the murk of 2002's Evil Heat, the results are still variable. [Jul 2006, p.104]
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Q MagazineIn creating a party record that will easily translate to the festival season's main stages they've also reversed out of the narrow tunnel that, for all their adventure, they were being led into by the bombastic Xtrmntr and Evil Heat. [Jul 2006, p.110]
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SpinLooks back to Dixie-Narco, their 1992 EP that brought raw-power ferocity to Memphis soul. [Sep 2006, p.110]
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The band mostly avoids the mythic seriousness of the past in favor of party-ready stuff like "Country Girl" and meaty rock sonics.
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"Riot City Blues" starts fairly poorly and gets progressively worse.
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Riot City Blues would make a wonderful addition to any pub’s jukebox, but it’s galling how ordinary Primal Scream sound when they’re not crackling with the sparks of invention that coloured a record like Screamadelica.
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The songs are imitative and lackluster.
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It's nice that Primal Scream attacks these tunes with gusto, but the passionate performance doesn't hide the fact that this album is utterly inessential, little more than a sampler for what amounts to a really swell wedding band.
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It's unconvincing and bland.
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They make two kinds of albums. File Riot City Blues under "Shite."
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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.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 21 out of 31
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Mixed: 4 out of 31
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Negative: 6 out of 31
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Apr 17, 2016
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Jan 17, 2015
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BarryMFeb 14, 2007