Beyond the stars
BOBBY GILLESPIE might look like a man who could be flattened by a dandelion clock, but when it comes to attitude, Primal Scream have always been heavyweights. Since Screamadelica, they have used rock’n’roll like a defence system, piling up the political graffiti, hedonistic slogans and retro off-cuts around them like barricades, daring those who didn’t take them seriously to enter their territory and say that to their faces. Following 2013’s solid More Light, however, Chaosmosis sounds like the work of a band with a few new chinks in their armour – not a sign of debility, in this case, but an important developmental step. It’s not obviously clear from the opening Trippin’ On Your Love, a baggy burble with Summer-of-Love strings and Haim on backing vocals, that remembers Loaded as if it was yesterday (blurry round the edges, key moments missing). Its blithe swagger is, however, destabilised by the line “Stare into the void too long/It stares back into you.” If some of Primal Scream’s recent output – 2006’s Riot City Blues, for example – could feel like a bolshy, protests-too-much midlife-crisis, this is the first sign of surprising introspection, the mark of a band realising they don’t need to be in snarling denial of their vulnerabilities. Rather than any Gillespie state of the nation addresses, subtle as a mohawk on a Churchill statue, Chaosmosis addresses churning inner turmoil, a touch of soul that, unusually, they don’t have to overstate. Golden Rope’s Stooges stomp is transformed by the closing insistence that “I know that there is something wrong with me.” The equally inward-looking I Can Change is carried on a flimsy keyboard setting that sounds like it belongs in an adult education dance class, and is therefore more genuinely unhinged than any number of out-of-it handclaps and “yeah”s; the same aura of disturbed, paperthin reality is also apparent on the fragile folk exhalation of Private Wars. They haven’t completely shunned the electro-pop aggro: 100% Or Nothing, again with Haim, is as good as its ferocious title, while Where The Light Gets In, featuring Sky Ferreira, fills any philosophical emptiness with a parade-balloon-sized chorus of “peace begins within”. Yet Chaosmosis is not euphoric: there’s a real chill in the air of (Feeling Like A) Demon Again, The Cure’s A Forest playing in an amusement arcade, and its goth bleeping is pushed even further by When The Blackout Meets The Fallout’s industrial static. On the stark electronic relationship breakdown of Carnival Of Fools, Gillespie sings: “I didn’t know what to say/I didn’t know who to be.” By shedding some of their rock’n’roll excess, though, it feels as if Primal Scream finally have some idea of what they want to be when they grow up.
Eleven albums in, veteran rabble-rousers get in touch with their feelings. By Victoria Segal.