Is there a Nineties rock legend version of the Bat-Signal? A vintage strobe they flash up into the geopolitical ash clouds of the 2020s to summon sonic superheroes of Gen X’s youth? Last week, The Cure rose from the grave to run us a warm bath of gothic solace. Now Primal Scream are back with Come Ahead, a ridiculously funky stew of a record that all but laces your Gazelles, flops your fringe over your eyes and drags you onto the dance floor for a baggy-limbed boogie.
The shapeshifting indie-dance combo’s first album in eight years (and their first since the death of former keyboardist Martin Duffy) arrives fully loaded with flute, horns, bongos, maracas, a banging gospel choir and bulletproof bass lines as tight’n’rubbery as Batman’s bodysuit. Bobby Gillespie’s surly-slurry vocal snakes through the mix, rekindling your own inner sneer of resistance.
Now 63, Gillespie has never quite had the voice to match his colossal ‘tude. But he can still channel the back-alley menace of a truant teen. He allows himself a genuinely invigorating little “woo!” over the moody synths and dramatic strings of opening track “Ready to Go Home”. He snarls over the jagged riffing and rabble-rousing drums of “Love Ain’t Enough” and swoons an everyman’s karaoke soul into “Heal Yourself”.
As the band’s primary songwriter, his self-aggrandising swagger has always been absurd but infectious. In his fascinating 2021 memoir, Tenement Kid, he wrote that he wanted to celebrate their 1991 gig at The Hacienda in Manchester by handing out ecstasy pills to everyone in the audience (their label boss, Alan McGee, talked him out of it). But to this day, Gillespie is still committed to creating a hedonistic atmosphere by splicing together influences from his own cooler-than-yours vinyl collection.
Primal Scream have already played with punk, indie, dance, Stones-pastiching rock and country, so funk is just another genre to tick off the list. On Come Ahead, said funk has been intoxicatingly spiked by some proggy Pink Floydery. So you’ll find soaring electric guitar solos by Andrew Innes and a raucous part of sax on piano-backed dirge “Melancholy Man”, spoken word sections and full-throttle female backing vocals. This new Seventies direction was sparked by producer David Holmes (who also produced 2000’s excellent XTRMNTR) and caught the nostalgic mood of Gillespie, who’d been looking back on his Glaswegian roots to write Tenement Kid.
His snarly left-wing politics owe a debt to his trade unionist dad (who appears on this album’s cover) and infuse all of the album’s lyrics. It might not be solution-oriented or sophisticated stuff: ballad “False Flags” laments the waste of army dreamers while “Deep Dark Waters” notes that the UK’s “island fortress” success owes a debt to our awful colonial history. The confrontational glottal stops of Renee Alynne pops on the glitterball groove of “Innocent Money” to preach that “there’s no trickle down… trick!” There’s a reckoning with alcohol on “Circus of Life” as the band who once championed their generation’s right to “get loaded” explore the isolation and misery of a man “nailed to the bottle”.
But I had a much-needed blast dancing around my house to the Curtis Mayfield-indebted flutes and hippy optimism of “Love Insurrection” and the Afro-dub strum of “The Centre Cannot Hold”. Holy smoke, Bobman! We needed Come Ahead this week.
