Primal Scream

Few contemporary bands can challenge Primal Scream for their ability to revolutionize music, knocking out two era-defining classic albums and, well, consuming enough drugs to kill a small nation. The fact that they've been around for 30 years just makes it all the more impressive. For their tenth LP, Bobby Gillespie and the gang have created yet another release that sounds like no other in their catalogue. Their first in five years, following 2008's Beautiful Future, More Light finds the Scream doing what they do best: channelling the past while building music that sounds like the future. Hiring long-time collaborator and soundtrack master David Holmes to produce, More Light begins with the nine-minute "2013," a sprawling political time bomb lifted by Kevin Shields' enchanted guitar noise, which is followed by seven-minute free jazz mind-melt "River of Pain." The genre blurring continues, reaching the middle-ground between punk and Kraut-rock on "Hit Void," flirting with girl group melodies on "Goodbye Johnny," dirty Southern swamp rock on the Robert Plant-assisted "Elimination Blues" and '60s-tinged gospel on "It's Alright, It's Ok." Were it any other band, this much tourism would crash and burn, but the Scream have always been travellers who could master anything by aligning themselves with the right collaborators. More Light is not only an all-encompassing trip that shows everything they're capable of, but also the best album they've made since 2000's XTRMNTR.