Track Listing

1. Beautiful Future
2. Can't Go Back
3. Uptown
4. The Glory Of Love
5. Suicide Bomb
6. Zombie Man
7. Beautiful Summer
8. I Love To Hurt (You Love To Be Hurt)
9. Over & Over
10. Necro Kex Blues
11. The Glory Of Love

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38890 in Music
• Released on: 2008-07-21
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .24 pounds

Amazon.co.uk Review
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 2000’s unrelentingly anarchic Xtrmntr). To claim any future, especially after the all-too-brief successes of 2006’s turgid Riot City Blues, let alone a handsome one is foolhardy to say the least. But, you see, they’re actually being cuttingly sarcastic, or so we ascertain from Bobby Gillespie’s ham-fisted sloganeering on the title track’s tirade against modern ills ("you live by the sword, you die by the sword, you’re only free to buy things you can’t 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 amid the band’s 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 CSS’s Lovefoxx as this album’s 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 they’ll live to see another day. A future of some sort is assured. --James Berry

CD Description
Enduring indie stalwarts follow 2006's 'Riot City Blues' with this, their ninth album and first for B-Unique. Having made their name by always trying something different with every new release, on this album they mash up soul, dark electro, rock 'n' roll riffs and classic pop songwriting. Produced by Paul Epworth (Bloc Party) and Bjorn Yttling of Peter, Bjorn & John, it includes the single 'Can't Go Back' and features input from Lovefoxx of CSS, folk legend Linda Thompson and Queens Of The Stone Age's Josh Homme.

Customer Reviews

Can't go back, so look to the future
I have to admit that, on first listen, I was really quite taken aback by this album - it isn't what I was expecting at all. Even though Primal Scream have, throughout the years, been musical chameleons, 'Beautiful Future' is different enough from their previous releases to be a genuine surprise when you first hear it. I have noticed that this album has pretty much split the fanbase down the middle and I can't say I'm shocked - this album has probably the most catchy, shimmering, near-mainstream pop Primal Scream have ever released with only glimpses of the hard-edged dirtiness which have characterised some of their most loved releases in the last decade or so.

In fact, when the opening, title track starts, complete with chiming bells, bouncy beat and radio-friendly sing-a-long chorus, you wonder if they're joking but, as it turns out, they're not - they're serious and, quite honestly, it's seriously good. The single 'Can't Go Back' is a raucous piece of brilliance which, along with the menacing 'Suicide Bomb' and the brilliant Josh Homme collaboration 'Necro Hex Blues', provide the edge and character which makes the album distinctively Primal Scream, but the album is equally as good for songs such as the mellow, chilled out 'Uptown' and the understated but catchy 'Glory Of Love'. There's even a quietly superb break-up ballad, a cover of Fleetwood Mac's 'Over & Over' featuring Linda Thompson. Not everything on 'Beautiful Future' is exactly fantastic, in fact there is a distinct mid-album lull, but it's all very listenable and, on the whole, a very good album.

Leave your pre-conceptions and reservations behind - Primal Scream have made an album to be enjoyed, so just buy it with an open mind, play it, go with the flow and enjoy it but, be warned, if you want anything similar to 'XTRMNTR' or 'Evil Heat', you're likely to be very disappointed.

Thankfully back on track. The Scream rediscover their form...
Following 2006's lamentable `Riot City Blues`, it's a joy to hear Primal Scream take yet another, more virtuous U-turn on `Beautiful Future`.

Gone are the retro-rock posturing and lyrical laziness that hampered their previous record and in with the trademark electronics and powering guitars, not heard since their underrated "Evil Heat" album of 2002.

Although still not the Primal Scream turned up to 11 they gave us on `Xtrmntr', `Beautiful Future' is certainly a step in the right direction. The brooding paranoia on `Uptown', `Suicide Bomb' and `Beautiful Summer' rank as some of their best efforts yet while lead single, `Can't Go Back' comes on like the shiny cousin of `Accelerator`.

This time round however, the albums finest moments lay with it's collaborators.

Lovefoxxx adds a haunting vocal to the chilling `I Love To Hurt (You Love To Be Hurt)' which also marks the welcome return of Jagz Kooner on electronics. This is followed by Bobby and folk star Linda Thompson dueting on `Over & Over' - a track which could have easily been lifted from `Screamadelica'.

Lined-up against their previous work, it sits best next to 1998's `Vanishing Point'. An album that also came at a time when Primal Scream had been all but written off after the critical shrug of the shoulders that was `Give Out But Don't Give Up'.

With a resilience that holds no bars, you can't help but think if nuclear fall-out were to happen tomorrow all that would remain would be cockroaches and Primal Scream.

So...all is forgiven. Bring on album number ten.

Unfinished Symphonies
Absolutely have to agree with Mark Astons review here over the missing-middle-eight-repetitiveness of this album. At first listen it sounds like a glorious sugar coated update of the Screams first album, "Sonic Flower Groove", with "Beautiful Future" and the "Glory of Love "(in both forms) particularly brilliant in a second-summer-of-pop type way. "Uptown" is good in the same way that "Trainspotting" and "Screamadelica" (the track not the album) were, and cover "Over & Over" is another Broken Bobby (TM) version of "Damaged". But it's true, all these songs sound unfinished and either repeat themselves adnausium in some sick loop after about 20 seconds, or else take the cursed fade out route at the end. Criminal stuff because this could have been once of The Screams best albums. As it is it bores you senseless after a couple of listens.