Primal Scream - Beautiful Future (Japan 2008)

2008 album from the acclaimed British Alt-Rockers, the 10th album by this exciting and inventive band fronted by Bobby Gillespie. Since the band's inception at the tail end of the '80s, their string of releases have continued to astound and delight their fans while also managing to be commercially successful. Beautiful Future was produced by Bjorn Yttling (Peter, Bjorn & John) and Paul Epworth (Bloc Party) and features guest appearances from Lovefoxx (CSS), Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone age) and Folk legend Linda Thompson. 11 tracks including 'The Glory of Love', 'Can't Go Back', 'Zombie Man' and more. Warner.

Beautiful Future--a hopelessly optimistic moniker for their ninth album, no matter which way you approach it, since Primal Scream are almost universally accepted to have strutted past their zenith around the same time they helpfully mislaid their vowels (on 2000s unrelentingly anarchic Xtrmntr). To claim any future, especially after the all-too-brief successes of 2006s turgid Riot City Blues, let alone a handsome one is foolhardy to say the least. But, you see, theyre actually being cuttingly sarcastic, or so we ascertain from Bobby Gillespies ham-fisted sloganeering on the title tracks tirade against modern ills ("you live by the sword, you die by the sword, youre only free to buy things you cant afford", etc.). If anything in particular is exposed as a spent force here it is he and his pen, sense disregarded to the point of parody, words drifting like flotsam and the bands systematic attempts to reinvent themselves. The small miracle is that they just about manage. "Beautiful Future" leads into the album with a curious and eventually overwhelming infectiousness, gleaming like CSS delivering a Shirelles pastiche complete with cheesy bell-ringing and an effeminate vocal delivery that almost clouds over the lyrical content. "I Love to Hurt (You Love to Be Hurt)" actually features CSSs Lovefoxx as this albums Kate Moss and holds its own with some minimalist malevolence. As an album it jerks and it stumbles, lacking a definitive identity, but it at least ensures theyll live to see another day. A future of some sort is assured. --James Berry