Looking cool in shades , a 1960 photograph the father of frontman Bobby Gillespie decorates the band’s 12th LP, and their first for 8 years, serving very much as a inspiration with a Glaswegian fighting-talk phrase, but musically filled with 70s Philly soul and funk, and with the input of Belfast producer David Holmes, it’s one of PS’s most stylish for years. Gilllespie himself seems to be contemplating mortality on this record, and the opener Ready To Go Home was sang to his father on his deathbed, culminating in its finished form, a fabulously catchy piece of disco-funk-soul with gospel backing singers and some psychedelic elements alongside the lavish string arrangements. Love Insurrection continues in the same musical style, but perhaps the most striking is the sensationally catchy disco funk of The Centre Cannot Hold. Deep Dark Waters is a dark, swirling piece of stylish psychedelia and has a certain menace. Lyrically there are digs at all sorts of modern-world ills as well as personal ones, from the reflective and rather beautiful False Flags, a heart-wrenching first-person narrative inspired by a young Gillespie Snr’s army experiences. And not least from the lengthy, simmering album closer Settlers Blues, one that hovers over periods of conflict through history, touching on English colonialism by referencing Culloden and Cromwell in Ireland, but also with un references to the current atrocities in Palestine. A dynamic, different, bold new release, musically very eclectic, and great to see Primal Scream back with an album that’s both touching, emotional, powerful, but in other parts, catchy and dancey. Out on BMG.
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