Primal Scream have spent a lot of this century on autopilot. Each album after 2000’s XTRMNTR has respectfully rehashed frontman Bobby Gillespie’s predominant components: 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 Mild had DJ and Steven Soderbergh collaborator David Holmes—however usually, if you happen to’ve heard one Primal Scream album prior to now 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 Residence,” 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Primal Scream album for the reason that passing of each Gillespie’s father and the band’s keyboardist Martin Duffy—an outdated household photograph of Gillespie’s dad graces the duvet—and his restrained vocal supply sounds shaken by current encounters with demise that don’t fairly really feel peaceable or comforting. Gillespie excels at writing openers, and “Able to Go Residence” 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 Mild, 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 gasoline 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 wishes for a greater world sung by a profitable rock star who sounds virtually bored, like he’s muttering “I nonetheless must sing about this shit?” between takes. For those who’re actively looking for a brand new Primal Scream album in 2024, you’ve possible already heard and agreed with the whole lot Gillespie has to say.