What can a heritage rock band do when they’re remembered for one or two albums and a handful of songs, and when so much of the rest of their music lounges in the lower regions of Spotify or is stacked in second-hand-record shops?
Primal Scream, like many groups of their vintage (they formed in 1982), have come to a point where they’re damned if they try to replicate the styles and sonic atmospheres of their best-known songs and censured if they try something even remotely new. So will long-standing fans of the band’s golden commercial phase – which spanned the time from the peerless Screamadelica, in 1991, to the mediocre Evil Heat, in 2002 – pay any heed to Come Ahead?
There is another potential reason why fans might steer clear of the Glasgow band’s 12th album. In April 2022 they sold song rights to 50 per cent of their back catalogue to BMG for £5 million, but when Martin Duffy, who had been their keyboard player since 1989, died in December 2022, he received nothing from the financial windfall. Duffy’s son, Louie, believed his father should have been regarded as a full-time member and not as something more like a permanent session musician.
Such context is important for a music act whose previous, barely remembered album, Chaosmosis, was released eight years ago. Where will fans’ loyalties lie, and is Come Ahead strong enough to offset their concerns and reconnect them to music that once took them to different levels of ecstasy?
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It helps that Bobby Gillespie’s lyrics are much more personal than usual. (They’ve sometimes been awful, as in Country Girl’s “Crazy women mess your head, wake up drunk and beaten in some strange bed”.) Primal Scream’s de-facto leader has had to deal with the death, in 2023, of his father, Robert (a photograph of whom is used as the album’s cover). Another opportunity for contemplation will have come with the process of writing Tenement Kid, his 2021 memoir.
But the songs are woefully inadequate.
After Utopian Ashes, Gillespie’s morose end-of-relationship album with Jehnny Beth of Savages, in 2021, Come Ahead was initially conceived as a solo work. It was encouraging that the Belfast producer and soundtrack musician David Holmes, who first worked with Primal Scream on their vigorous XTRMNTR, from 2000, got involved. He’d be able to put a steady hand on Gillespie’s shoulders and bring in references to the band’s glory days without overemphasising the obvious.
No such luck – not even someone as experienced as Holmes has been able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Tracks such as Deep Dark Waters, Ready to Go Home, Love Insurrection, Heal Yourself, The Centre Cannot Hold and Innocent Money come across as sterilised approximations of soft-shuffle Philly soul, facsimile Chic and fuzzy memories of far more vital songs.
Innocent Money, for example, sounds like elevator music influenced by a Hall & Oates tribute act – and the song’s background chants of “always the wealthy, never the poor” seem incongruous in the light of that back-catalogue sale. It gets worse with the piano-based ballad Melancholy Man, on which Gillespie’s lyrics plumb depths not even professional pearl divers would risk their lives for.
Matters brighten up with the semi-spoken-word track False Flags, which benefits from slow-motion electro underpinning a tale about the lives of two teenagers, one of whom wants to be a pop star, the other of whom decides to join the British army – “I went down to the office, put my name on the list, the recruitment sergeant said we’ll make a man of you yet.”
The longest track, Settlers Blues, plays out the album with nine minutes of more spoken-word ruminations on the evils of English colonialism through the centuries, but despite the song’s potentially interesting lyrical angles, which include genocide and land seizure – “The conquered become the conquerors, a murderous diaspora,” Gillespie sings, although with little apparent conviction – it’s too late and far too tedious.
Long-time fans expecting a return to form will be sorely disappointed. Throughout the 1990s Gillespie and his bandmates were viewed as the torchbearers of a particular kind of hedonism: their track Loaded, on Screamadelica, was described as “Sympathy for the Devil for the E generation”. Come Ahead is far removed from such zeitgeist-driven dynamism, however.
Come Ahead, Gillespie writes in the album notes, is a Glaswegian term for accepting a fight. There is little sign here of boldness, let alone the singer’s previously embraced belligerence. Movin’ on up? Whatever direction Primal Scream and Gillespie are taking, it isn’t skyward.
