Album Review: Primal Scream, Come Ahead

‘Ready To Go Home’ cracks open Come Ahead, Primal Scream’s 12th album, with a blissful gospel choir, which swerves swiftly into a delicious funk jam complete with orchestral strings, religious overtones, stomping dance beat and zapping chiptunes. It’s the Scream alright, or at least one version of this most versatile of bands. On the Primals’ last outing, 2016’s Chaosmosis, head buck-cat Bobby Gillespie delivered his most intimate record, and he doubles down on that schtick here.

Bobby’s father, a man who possessed a lifelong commitment to social justice, is the record’s inspiration. The artwork was created using a photograph of Robert Gillespie Senior, while his manifesto is outlined on ‘Love Insurrection’, complete with a call to arms delivered in oratorical Italian. ‘Deep Dark Waters’ and ‘The Centre Cannot Hold’, meanwhile, extend the statement of principles.

Production wizard David Holmes is on the job, a previous Scream collaborator, who usually shows up when the band are grinding a particular beef – evidenced during the war on class privilege that was XTRMNTR, and the fury at ceaseless inequality on More Light. His cinematic fingerprints are all over ‘Innocent Money’ and ‘Melancholy Man’, the latter featuring a marvellous freak-out guitar solo. Elsewhere, ‘False Flags’ and ‘Settlers Blues’ are a pair of densely worded diatribes like nothing else in the band’s canon. On they plough.

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