Primal Scream

More Light

(1st International/Ignition)

After the stylistic incoherence of 2008's Beautiful Future, a lucrative but arguably lazy couple of years revisiting Screamadelica and yet another line-up tweak (Mani from The Stone Roses out, Debbie Googe from My Bloody Valentine in then out, with unknown Simone Butler finally picking up the bass), it's high time Primal Scream regained their focus with some decent new material. And it's here from the off: on nine-minute opener 2013, regular collaborator Kevin Shields's guitars wrap around a hypnotically repetitive early Roxy Music saxophone riff and Bobby Gillespie's reawakened political mantras. The album gets too psychedelically trippy as it goes on, and could do with trimming a couple of tracks from its unnecessarily long 66-minute running time, especially that shuffly mock-gospel relapse at the very end. But under the strong guiding hand of producer David Holmes, this is the best thing the band have done since XTRMNTR in 2000: a harder-hitting, sharper-edged album that repositions Primal Scream as a genuine alternative music force rather than post-acid indie granddads.

Alan Morrison