Beautiful Future

**

Having tried their hands at house music, krautrock, rhythm and blues, dub, gospel, soul and even fey indie jangling, Primal Scream find themselves scratching around for ideas on album No.9. The solution? Decamp to Stockholm with Bjorn Yttling (of Peter, Bjorn & John fame) and hope he can inject a little Swedish pop vim into ten songs best described as 'patchy'.

Initially it seems to work – the title track is bright and bouncy (albeit with some very dark lyrics about "naked bodies hanging from the trees") while Can't Go Back sounds like a disco version of the MC5; it all goes horribly wrong, however, with the pallid funk of Uptown, the lame 80s pop of Glory of Love and the hopeless vocal mismatch with Lovefoxx of CSS on I Love to Hurt (You Love to be Hurt).

It's left to folk great Linda Thompson to rescue proceedings with a soulful duet with Bobby Gillespie on Fleetwood Mac's Over and Over. On this evidence, though, the Scream's future is hardly beautiful.

B-unique



Mikal Blue

Gold

**

The vogue for populist singer-songwriters may be over but there are still latecomers like Mikal Blue trying to get in on the act. Geordie-born but US resident for the last few years, Mikal worked as a producer for the likes of The Offspring, One Republic and Gary Jules before taking a six-month sabbatical to shape the songs for his own album.

Those production skills give Gold the necessary sheen for daytime radio but they can't mask the ordinariness of songs like Heaven, Magazine and Already Lost You. Likewise Mikal's voice, which is serviceable throughout but hardly distinctive.

Not even the odd Beatles-esque chord change on Change Tomorrow or Pepper can lift this above the mediocre.

Immergent



Melee

Devils & Angels

**

More pop-rock of the fair to middling variety is served up by Melee, an American four-piece influenced, they say, by "the songwriting classicism of piano men Elton John, Coldplay's Chris Martin and neo-soul star John Legend". On Built To Last and Can't Hold On they even sound like a rockier version of Keane.

The best track here, Frequently Baby (She's a Teenage Maniac), does at least have a giddy piano riff to propel it along; elsewhere, though, Rhythm of the Rain and For a Lifetime chug along with guitar riffs that never quite catch flame while the piano ballad She's Gonna Find Me Here is Elton-lite rather than Elton-like, as presumably intended.

It's better than Mikal Blue but hardly original.

Warner Bros