Give up, don't Give Out?

Primal Screams umpteenth album is the oddly titled “Beautiful Future”. Now, I can’t tell you if this is any good or not - because I’m not sure this is a Primal Scream album. Are you sure it isn’t a mislabelled disc? A pressing fault?

Well, a late night Tv appearance where a band called Primal Scream solved that for me. On the TV, these songs sounded much better. They weren’t smothered in a homogenous production.

Admittedly, its not up there with the time I unwrapped a Kraftwerk CD to get the 1997 Dance Remixes of “It’s Raining Men”, but its not far from it. Someone’s replaced Primal Scream with something less impressive. The songs aren’t particularly great : that said, it’s an improvement on the retro stylings of “Riot City Blues” which was an average late 60’s alternative rock LP. “Beautiful Future” takes the softer edges of their “Evil heat” album, and distils the edge further to create a soft-but-hard sound - a plastic knife of a record. Dispossessed and angry songs are tempered by clean guitars and understated drums and rhythms that remind me of some of the more adventurous moments on 1980’s albums by Gary Numan and OMD : and not in a good way. Bobby Gillespies distinctive voice seems smeared into the background with his individual stylings airbrushed out. Melodies hover around the songs without actually attaching themselves to the tune. As if you’re listening to two songs at the same time. Vocal melodies are short, clipped, repetitive, and thus fail to imprint themselves.

The singles “Can’t Go Back” and “Glory of Love” are competent additions, but fail to grab the listener by the throat. It’s as if, in this age of diluted musical attention, where records vy for attention over the 987 TV channels and 60,000,000 websites and a gazillion MP3’s, the band have failed to be anything other than another musical product, which is a great shame. This music may very well be the soundtrack for middle-aged washing up, for all I know.

There’s also another nagging sense that the songs are unfinished. Most of side two meanders into short excursions, and the songs fade out in the verses, which seems to me that perhaps the band haven’t yet really worked out how to finish the songs. Will this do? I imagine them offering their record label. Maybe not. “Suicide Bomb” is a space filling instrumental, and “Zombie Man” sounds exactly like a song left off 1994’s rock-pig drug-excess homage to Lynrd Skynrd which is “Give Out But Don’t Give Up”. In fact, its only “Narco Hex Blues” which sounds like the work of musicians in a room playing music instead of a bunch of bedroom noodling.

The drums are weaker than a kitten. The vocals are, at best, smeared and undistinguishable, another forgettable feature in a barren plain. There’s almost no guitars, and bass is a distant rumble. About the only thing I can remember is that this album sounds a lot like a bunch of anonymous session musicians trying to cover Talk Talk circa 1984 with disappointing results. It’s forgettable, bland, and dull, unless you think it’s 1981 again, at which point it sounds like a bunch of Simple Minds demos.

It’s not that good at all. Maybe it is time to stop giving out, and give up.

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