Primal Scream: Beautiful Future (B-Unique/Atlantic)

13:46 | Thursday May 29, 2008

Over the course of 20 years and eight albums, Bobby Gillespie and his merry men have continually influenced and adapted to the musical mood of the times, proving as adept in choosing their collaborators as surviving a series of excesses, fallouts and label changes.

Now signed to B-Unique and with their distinctly trad predecessor Riot City Blues still ringing in our ears, can they still impress with album nine?

It starts promisingly, with album opener and title track Beautiful Future tapping into the band’s love of idiot-savant, boogie rock with enough of a contemporary sheen to avoid cliché.

Following track Can’t Go Back also fails to disappoint, with echoes of 2000’s Accelerator contained within its nuclear-powered grooves. Tracks three and four, Uptown and Glory Of Love, are carried by a streamlined, post-disco sheen courtesy of producer Paul Epworth, who helmed most of the album’s sessions with Björn Yttling.

However, around this point the band noticeably slip into autopilot. If there ever was such a thing as a Primal Scream Title Generator, surely Suicide Bomb and Zombie Man would be among the first results to appear.

Similarly, Gillespie’s lyrics worryingly slump into his default damage/disease/junkie/fight/alright territory that we’ve heard many, many times before.

Thankfully the band play their joker for the album’s final tracks, releasing another canny set of collaborators to steer them away from the choppy waters of cliché.

CSS’s Lovefoxxx pops up on a pulsating I Love To Hurt (You Love To Be Hurt), while the beautiful space-country cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Over & Over – a duet with Linda Thompson – would not have sounded out of place on the band’s 1992 landmark Dixie-Narco EP.

Finally, Josh Homme thrashes his lead guitar about on the MC5-styled album closer Viva which, since founder member Throb’s departure a couple of years back, is the only track on the album where guitars remain noticeably at the forefront.

So, it’s business as usual for the Scream Team: a good selection of songs made better by a strong cast of collaborators, with Paul Epworth and his pulsating wooshy buttons deserving special commendation for giving the set a real cohesion.

You’ll blush at the at-times-rotten lyrics, but at the end of the day Primal Scream remain a pretty special band. Beautiful Future? Maybe not, but with each of their nine albums sounding completely different to any of their others, the band have certainly created a fascinating legacy.