If you or I set out to make an album aimed at rock critics, what would we do? Kick out the jams with MC5 guitars, throw in a few Chemical Brothers grooves perhaps, add PiL and Can to taste? Then recruit Bernard Sumner for that authentic Joy Division wall of sound and top the whole thing off with some of the most fiery rhetoric since the Sex Pistols and the Pop Group.
Sadly for us, Primal Scream have got there first. Their recent Exterminator album duly received some of the most ecstatic reviews in rock history, and compounded the feat by scorching into the top three (although it has already left the top 40). The band have certainly satisfied their fan base, but the question the wider public presumably want answering is "Yes, but are there any tunes?"
In fairness to the Scream, this is exactly the kind of apathy they are setting themselves up against. It's as if they have taken it upon themselves to shake pop - and politicians, hippies, milkmen, anything you've got - out of the current national collective torpor.
If inviting Exterminator home feels a bit like placing a Molotov on the mantelpiece, the live experience feels like walking into a nuclear war. From the moment Bobby Gillespie shouts "We're going to tear the roof off this place!" things are going to be painful.
Snatches of lyrics such as "the illusion of democracy" and "civil disobedience" struggle to be heard amid an aural cacophony, complete with wailing saxophones, guitars like electric drills and PiL-esque soundscapes like walls of sheet metal clattering from a tower block. It comes to something when the jazz terrorism of If They Move, Kill 'em (from their previous album) comes as light relief.
Gillespie says little, adding to the impression of austerity, but the message is clear and if it isn't, lines such as "don't sell your soul" ram it home. As for the tunes, however, only the DAF-prototype electronic funk singles, Swastika Eyes and Kill All Hippies, escape a sonic mauling. During one particularly unlistenable moment, the punter next to me walked out. Meanwhile, the recently shorn Gillespie sways magnetically. However much this Glaswegian Clash fan is aware of pop's pose and iconography, he genuinely believes.
This is pop being given a dose of castor oil. It may eventually make the patient better, but it tastes bloody awful at the time.
• At UEA, Norwich (01603 508050), tonight, then tour.
