PRIMAL SCREAM - Beautiful Future

Primal Scream seem determined to resist the wear of time at all costs, and with this "Beautiful Future" they manage to reaffirm their status as enlightened figures of Scottish rock, confirming once again their reputation for being unsinkable. It had happened before that, after a mediocre album, they'd manage to bounce back - recycling or reinventing themselves - and return to the top of the heap, but after 2006's "Riot City Blues", it seemed like Bobby Gillespie and co. had finally hit the home stretch toward irrelevance; and yet once again they manage to shed their skin and surprise us.

The album immediately distances itself from the stale retro-rock of the previous LP, reshuffling the cards played in the past and raising the stakes with a rock sound steeped in electronics, the way only they know how to play it; "Beautiful Future" is in fact not a turning-point album for Primal Scream, but rather a summary of what they've done across twenty years of constant reinvention and sudden mutations. There's pop, there's their hard-driving electronics, there's gospel, there's punk: nothing seems to be missing, and in this context the single "Can't Go Back" is a great show of vitality, capturing an aggressive band doing everything it can to bare its teeth (the video, packed with cinephile references, is well worth watching).

The album kicks off in fifth gear with the boogie of the title track, arranged with piano, saturated guitars and bells, but never straying from its Rolling Stones-style groove; the hallmark of the album is offering well-polished, carefully arranged pop songs without ever neglecting a certain rock urgency: "Uptown" indeed boasts an exquisite melody, with its dub bass and a melodic chorus wrapped in strings, yet it's not ashamed to flaunt its guitars, while "Suicide Bomb" is the most powerful track, thanks to a cadenced, martial pace and titanic riffs.

Other gems include "I Love To Hurt (You Love To Be Hurt)", which dusts off their insidious, sensual electronics, featuring Lovefoxxx - singer of Cansei de Ser Sexy - on counter-vocals, and the ballad "Beautiful Summer", which showcases Gillespie's seemingly limitless skills as an arranger.

A couple of stylistic missteps, however, mar an otherwise flawless album: first "Zombie Man", whose irresistible groove is undermined by questionable arrangements (an overblown gospel choir), then the not-quite-successful cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Over And Over", which is laid on so thick with sugar that it ends up sounding rather cloying.

On the whole, though, the album works, sounding powerful and solid, and showing off the great resources of a band that, twenty years on, takes stock of its situation, summing up an enviable career and reaffirming that it has no intention of growing old and dying.

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09/09/2008