Primal Scream: Beautiful Future
Album number nine from Bobby Gillespie and friends
Thursday, 24, Jul 2008 12:30
B-Unique, out July 21st.
In a nutshell...
Genre-spanning, adrenaline-charged, swaggering, sneering, return to form.
What's it all about?
Never conforming to expectations, Primal Scream return with a ten-track, genre-bending album that sees the band using their experience of shape-shifting to once again swerve attempts at being forced into an indie-rock pigeon hole.
Featuring the production skills of Peter, Bjorn and John's Bjorn Yttling and Bloc Party boardsman Paul Epworth, Beautiful Future is the band's first for new label B-Unique and - according to lead screamer Bobby Gillespie - is an attempt at fusing "atmospheres and instrumentation" into classic pop melodies.
Boasting contributions from Queens Of The Stone Age founder Josh Homme, folk singer Linda Thompson and CSS' Lovefoxxx, Primal Scream serve up a cocktail that is equal parts champagne and bourbon - with a Jagermeister chaser.
Who's it by?
Having emerged in the shoe-gazing mid-to-late eighties from the ashes of the Jesus And Mary Chain, Primal Scream rode high on the crest of the flowered-up early nineties with the 1991 classic Screamadelica, before steamrolling into the end of the millennium with lo-fi epics Vanishing Point and Xtrmntr.
Along the way there have been dalliances with funk, blues rock and strung out, jaded love songs. But thanks in part to the familiar drawl of lead singer Gillespie and the acquisition of former Stone Roses bass supremo Mani, Primal Scream have forged a sound that is unmistakably their own.
As an example...
"You go out dancin', takin' drugs with your friends/You feel so good you never want it to end/And when the comedown, hits the Monday arrives/Back in the office, can't you factor a line/Dream of uptown, uptown, uptown... Saturday night," - Uptown.
Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys
The band's third album Screamadelica is a regular feature in the 'all-time best' lists and critics have in the past fallen over themselves to heap praise on 1997's Vanishing Point and 2000's Xtrmntr.
However, a couple of misfires over the years - most notably 1994's Give Out But Don't Give Up - and a mixed response to recent efforts Evil Heat and Riot City Blues, mean only time will tell if Beautiful Future wins the praise Primal Scream have been so deserving of in the past.
What the others say
"Beautiful Future sees Primal Scream still daring to live the life." - Caspar Llewellyn Smith, Observer
"Simpler and poppier than previous efforts, Beautiful Future nonetheless ploughs through a breathtaking array of musical stylings and lyrical standpoints." - Chris Gilliver, Manchester Evening News
So is it any good?
Opening with the album's anthemic title track, Beautiful Future sets out its stall quickly, combining saccharine pop with driving bass and a throbbing, digital backbone.
Can't Go Back recalls Xtrmntr-style guitars and adds a more accessible - yet equally unrelenting - chorus and album highlight Uptown shows off Mani's silky bass skills, set against the backdrop of a seedy eighties disco at midnight.
Unfortunately, the middle section of the record sags a little and the lightly-paced pop of The Glory of Love and monochrome guitars of Suicide Bomb only serve to allow comic stomp-a-long Zombie Man more credit than it probably deserves.
However, after this we're back on track and the haunting organs and hypnotic guitars of Beautiful Summer, which perhaps owe some atmospheric debt to the Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter, are another dark and perfect moment to savour.
I Love To Be Hurt clicks along a similar pace to Joy Division's She's Lost Control and a cover of Fleetwood Mac's Over & Over provides welcome respite before Josh Homme plugs in for a closing track that sounds just as explosive as such a promising collaboration should.
There's can be no doubt about it, Primal Scream have once again perplexed with an album so full of different tastes it resembles a bag of Revels - but with only two or three coffee-flavoured nuggets in the packet, its well worth the pocket money.
8/10
Noel Mellor
"AAAHHH!!!I love Give Out But Dont Give Up, underrated in my book. Will be adding this to my collection ASAP" - Jennifer Alexander