According to frontman Bobby Gillespie, for a while he wasn’t entirely sure if there would ever be another Primal Scream album after 2016’s entirely forgettable Chaosmosis. Should they have bothered? Well, new album Come Ahead is a sporadically groovy yet ultimately frustrating affair in which the music of fellow Scream stalwart Andrew Innes and star producer David Holmes repeatedly steals the show from under their leader’s feet.
Gillespie has never been the strongest singer or lyricist, but Primal Scream at their best have always managed to work around his limitations. Come Ahead is not Primal Scream at their best. Granted, it isn’t a total disaster. Holmes’s symphonic funk arrangements are undeniably attractive, but that in itself presents a problem. I’d love to hear, say, the neopsychedelic/blaxploitation‐tastic Innocent Money as a powerhouse instrumental, Gillespie’s unarresting vocals just get in the way.
And yet, to be fair, he sounds absolutely fine on lead single and instant ear-worm Love Insurrection, a Curtis Mayfield-inspired flute-’n’-strings groove that’s the best thing here by miles. He also sings well on the surging gospel P-Funk of misleadingly promising album opener Ready To Go Home (southern soul gospel vocals loom large on Come Ahead, they do a lot of heavy-lifting).
Unfortunately those undoubted highlights are undermined by quite a lot of dross. Settler’s Blues is a laughable attempt at writing a serious pro-Scottish Independence ballad, and instead comes across as a Billy Connolly spoof of old folk music. Sample lyric: ‘In that Culloden field the dream was crushed, when the Redcoats covered it in Highland blood.’
Melancholy Man is a plodding dirge elevated somewhat by Innes’s David Gilmour-ish guitar. False Flags is an evidently sincere tribute to those multiple generations of working-class men who were sent off to war, although at one point Gillespie seems to veer off into simply describing the plot of The Deer Hunter. These dud tracks are unfortunate, as Come Ahead does contain some pretty decent music when everyone involved puts their minds to it. But even the album’s title - an old Glasgow colloquialism that basically translates as ‘Yes, I would like to fight you’ – fails to measure up to its intent as a triumphant comeback.
Primal Scream: don’t remember them this way.
