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After 25 years of venerable career and after experimenting with multiple genres including alternative rock, acid house, and indie pop, the Scottish band returns to the market with this ninth album, titled with a good dose of irony, "Beautiful Future," whose cover vaguely resembles a crime scene from any thriller movie.
The same goes for the music video of the single "Can't Go Back" which they meticulously recorded to represent their main themes, focused particularly on the crimes and offenses that happen today, now so spontaneously and cruelly worldwide, from which "one cannot go back anymore to attempt in every way to fix." An interesting fact about this new work is that "Beautiful Future" is also their first album for their new label, B-Unique, known for recently releasing the latest work by the same Kaiser Chiefs.
"Beautiful Future" has been classified by many critics and their own fans as a "stopgap album," after having effectively realized that, by partially returning to their original sound, they have decided to definitively abandon the experimental and highly electronic sounds of the controversial but still successful "Evil Heat" and "XTRMNTR." (famous for the collaboration with Kate Moss in the song "Some Velvet Morning" and the "infernal" video for the single "Miss Lucifer"). To make it all even more lively are interesting vocal contributions from Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age and Lovefoxx of CSS in the respective songs "Necro Hex Blues" and "I love to Hurt (You Love to Be Hurt)."
On sites like last.fm, the single "Can't Go Back," a splendid example of that rock’n’roll covered by kinetic and messy rhythms and technical guitar riffs, has already been listened to thousands of times by users from all over the world: a record that the same band, in recent interviews, has declared they could never have imagined (the same goes for the countless listens of the new album on their Myspace). Leaving aside this single, however, the new record is a pleasant seesaw in synthetic pop/rock, from the '70s to the present day, from the use of marimba and piano of Abba to the acoustic sounds of Who Made Who, with striking returns to their past with "Zombie Man" which vaguely recalls, although at significantly lower levels, some historic piece of the award-winning "Screamadelica" (did someone mention the famous Loaded or the "acid ballad" of the historic Movin’ on Up?). There were the usual flaws that we also found in their last work "Riot City Blues" with slow and heavy pieces that instinct suggests you skip immediately: for example, the cover of "Over and Over" by Fleetwood Mac, sung together with Linda Thompson, could have at least been postponed or, better yet, completely abandoned. To all this, it would be necessary to add two more tracks that instead contributed to making this new work more exciting and less repetitive compared to its predecessor: "Uptown", with a frantic and very suggestive refrain, and the beautiful and ghostly "Beautiful Summer", perhaps the most imposing episode of the record, demonstrating how Primal Scream still have something unique to deliver amidst a bewildered and chaotic present.
A return that greatly exceeded the disappointing expectations that critics and fans had only hypothesized before the early release.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
01 Beautiful Future (05:09)
Take a ride around your city
Tell me what do you see
Empty houses
Burning cars
naked bodies hanging from the tree
Don’t say what you’re thinking
Just think before you say
If you say the wrong thing
the man is gonna come and take you away
Oh you've got a beautiful future
A beautiful future
Oh you've got a beautiful future
A beautiful future
You tell me baby it’s good to be free
Can’t you see you’ll never be free
You live by the sword
You die by the sword
You’re only free to buy the things you can’t afford
A flash car
The house in the country
a sexy wife, beautiful children
Congratulations you live in a dream
With a dead heart at the control of the machine
Oh you've got a beautiful future
A beautiful future
Oh you've got a beautiful future
A beautiful future
Are you heading for the gas chamber
Do you wanna sit in the electric chair?
We’ve got a noose if you wanna hang around
Maybe a little torture to tousle up your hair
You've got a beautiful future
Take a ride around your city
tell me what do you see?
Pretty houses, expensive cars
Golden apples hanging from the trees
Oh you’ve got a beautiful future
Oh you've got a beautiful future
A beautiful future
Oh you've got a beautiful future
A beautiful future
Oh oh you live in a dream
With a dead heart at the control of the machine...
02 Can't Go Back (03:44)
I looked into my baby's eyes
I tried so hard to find some light
When I looked there was no one there
No one there at all
I walked on down a crowded street
I heard somebody talk to me
When I turned around to speak
There was no one there at all
Can't go back I can't go back
Can't go back I can't go back
Can't go back I can't go back
To the place I was before
I stuck a needle in my arm
I stuck it in my baby's heart
She looked so hot & sexy
She wasn't there at all
I heard some one break in my house
They had a gun they had a knife
But it was all behind my eyes
There was no one there at all
Can't go back I can't go back
Can't go back I can't go back
Can't go back I can't go back
To the place I was before
My baby looked into my eyes
She tried so hard to find some light
When She looked there was no one there
No one there at all
Can't go back I can't go back
Can't go back I can't go back
Can't go back I can't go back
To the place I was before
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Other reviews
By sylvian1982
The whole thing could be tersely summarized as a kind of compendium of the twenty-year history of Primal Scream.
The future may not be wonderful, but the present, if not astounding, for now, is quite reassuring.
By breakerfall
Beautiful Future is not the only Primal album that tells you everything right from the first time you listen to it.
The Primal Scream are certainly not activists... however, they seem more aligned with their time than anyone else.
