Never the highlight of any Primal Scream album, here they're inescapable: he is, as a rapper would say, all up in your grill. More baffling is the decision to foreground the vocals and lyrics of Bobby Gillespie. Uptown offers an improbable but great melding of disco strut with the motorik pulse of Neu! The single Can't Go Back stirs the more contemporary influence of the Klaxons into the mix. At its best, however, it comes up with a defiantly pop, richly melodic take on Krautrock. You'd be hard-pushed to call Beautiful Future anything other than patchy: it veers from a beautiful, reverb-drenched cover of Fleetwood Mac's Over and Over, featuring Linda Thompson, to the utterly wretched gospel-influenced Zombie Man.
However often they sink into the comforting torpor of Stones-influenced retro-rock, they eventually rouse themselves and try something different. Perhaps the privilege extended Primal Scream can be explained by the band's unique and impressive sense of restlessness.
It was subsequently revealed to be a derivative, self-parodic, stupid album delivered in deadly earnest, but by then the reviews were out: Primal Scream had got away with it again. Perhaps it's down to nostalgia: the present writer found himself among those unable to believe that the band behind the epochal Screamadelica and XTRMNTR could have dished up something as derivative, self-parodic and stupid as their 2006 album Riot City Blues, and concluded it was all a knowing joke: four out of five. I s any contemporary artist cut quite as much slack as Primal Scream? In recent years, they have regularly received weird, circle-squaring reviews in which adjectives like "embarrassing" and "ridiculous" figure heavily, but the star rating remains stuck at four or five.
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