The Primitives

Primitives: Echoes and Rhymes 

Reviewed By: Tommy Gunnarsson 
Label: Elefant Records 
Format: CD

My guess is that the Primitives are pretty tired of being coupled together with their sole top ten hit, 'Crash', released in 1988. Sure, they released plenty of more singles, and three albums as well, but neither of them did remarkably well in the charts. 

That doesn’t mean that the records were bad, of course. There were some really great songs on those albums, and especially their debut, 'Lovely'. After splitting up in the early 90s, the band reformed in 2009 for a couple of gigs in the UK and the US (featuring new bass player Paul Sampson, replacing Steve Dullaghan, who had died earlier that year), and apparently they enjoyed playing together again. Last year, Fortuna POP! released the EP 'Never Kill a Secret', and now Spanish label Elefant presents a whole new album, consisting of cover versions of “lesser-known female-fronted songs”. 

Some of them are not completely unknown, like Nico’s 'I’m Not Sayin’ and Sandy Posey’s 'A Single Girl', but mostly these are new acquaintances, at least for me. And before I go any further here, I should point out that they have picked great songs for this cover album. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that these were original Primitives songs, which is quite a positive remark. 

But, and sadly there is a “but” here, I can’t shake the feeling of it being a bit… well, how shall I put it… bland? In lack of better words, I have to settle for that one. Normally, I would give you a reason for that view, but this time, I can’t. It’s just a feeling I have. The album doesn’t make me go searching for superlatives. This is a shame really, because there are, as I said, some great songs here. To put it in other words: I will definitely keep this album, but I don’t think it will be a frequent guest in my CD-player.