Primal Scream have spent a lot of this century on autopilot. Each album after 2000’s XTRMNTR has respectfully rehashed frontman Bobby Gillespie’s major substances: acid-dipped grooves, quasi-political lyrics, melodies equally suited to 2 a.m. warehouse events or Rolling Stones ballads. The garnishes change—2016’s Chaosmosis had Sky Ferreira and Haim, 2013’s Extra Gentle had DJ and Steven Soderbergh collaborator David Holmes—however typically, should you’ve heard one Primal Scream album previously 25 years, you’ve heard all of them. This additionally applies to the Scottish band’s 12th album, Come Forward, however at the very least it embraces a brand new taste: Gillespie’s long-standing love of funk and soul.
The ghost of the Stax rhythm part haunts album opener “Able to Go House,” the place a gospel choir sings of being prepared for one’s time to return, punctuated by stressed strings, percussive bass, and jazzy horns that add throbbing stress. That is the primary new Primal Scream album for the reason that passing of each Gillespie’s father and the band’s keyboardist Martin Duffy—an previous household picture of Gillespie’s dad graces the quilt—and his restrained vocal supply sounds shaken by latest encounters with demise that don’t fairly really feel peaceable or comforting. Gillespie excels at writing openers, and “Able to Go House” establishes Come Forward as a nostalgia journey by the soul influences that, whereas current in Primal Scream’s DNA from the start, have by no means earlier than felt so apparent.
Holmes returns right here as producer; this reunion is extra profitable than the extra sprawling and dense Extra Gentle, as Gillespie lets him flip Primal Scream into the slick, muscular home band for a long-lost Ocean’s film. Come Forward peaks with the one-two punch of “Harmless Cash” and “Melancholy Man.” The cinematic former might soundtrack the fashionable grit of a basic Gordon Parks movie, or at the very least a Tarantino misremembering of Blaxploitation, whereas the downbeat latter comes from Gillespie’s 2023 rating for Émilie Deleuze’s 5 Hectares, reworked by Holmes and Primal Scream’s longtime second-in-command, guitarist Andrew Innes.
The album loses fuel within the again half, the place a number of songs appear to blur collectively into one lengthy, undifferentiated jam as repetition fatigue units in. Lyrically, the songs not explicitly about Gillespie’s father retread the identical leftist criticism of sophistication and politics we’ve been listening to since 1987—legitimate and related needs for a greater world sung by a profitable rock star who sounds nearly bored, like he’s muttering “I nonetheless should sing about this shit?” between takes. Should you’re actively looking for a brand new Primal Scream album in 2024, you’ve seemingly already heard and agreed with every part Gillespie has to say.
