As tattoos and spiked hair have given way to Snuglies and Wet-Naps, the once-alternative music has become "mallternative," the stuff of easy-listening radio stations geared toward shoppers.

Give Out But Don't Give Up was no Second Helping, let alone an Exile On Main Street. But Primal Scream made no pretences that it was. … British critics unfairly dismissed the album as karaoke rock. Yet today, the album sounds more immediate than most of what some writers are calling 'mallternative' rock being churned out by such bland sound-alikes as Third-Eye Blind, the Verve Pipe, Nixons Tonic and Dishwalla.

That's ancient history in the fast-food '90s, and there was a sense of been there, done that about the Horizon bill that indicated the dearth of new ideas on the commercial tip of mall-ternative rock.