PreHistoric Animals were formed in Sweden in 2015 by drummer Samuel Granath and vocalist/guitarist, Stefan Altzar, the duo releasing their debut album, Consider It A Work Of Art in 2018. For the subsequent tour and albums, they were joined by bassist Noah Magnusson and ex-Pain of Salvation guitarist Daniel Magdic. Interestingly, all four of them contribute on keys.
Finding Love in Strange Places (what a title) is their fourth studio album, so this collective is certainly not short of creativity or momentum. The accompanying press release for this describes it as a dystopic version of Love Actually, a Richard Curtis movie in which Hugh Grant, bless him, played a Blair like Prime Minister falling in love with an unlikely maid. I rather enjoyed the film, having liked Grant since I first saw him in Four Weddings……. The connection here is that this is a story about people finding love where they might least expect it, and being a romantic type of chap, this certainly pricked my interest.
There are nine tracks in a class work which brings increasing pleasure with each listen. It starts with The City of my Dreams, which lyrically is fascinating, with a country girl (the white witch) meeting the love of her life in a female cyber soldier (the black witch), lovemaking in a dirty old hotel and a city which is the centre of that dream, but I think is more likely to the rest of us to be akin to that as depicted in the classic movie, Blade Runner, and the heavy electronica riffs do nothing to dispel that sense of a huge, ugly, and forbidding place. It rips along at a fair old pace, the rhythm section especially putting in a massive shift, but you will notice from the embedded track below amidst the furious noise and effects some quite gorgeous notes on guitar and gentle keys. A strong start to proceedings.
This is followed by the wonderfully titled A Bad Day for the Neon Gods, which I take as a direct follow on from the opener with a sense of utter loss in a short piece which is rather lovely, melodic in a paeon to the lost love.
Living In A World Of Bliss is a wonder, really, telling of an encounter with a girl in white boots and a Motorhead t-shirt (ah, the stuff of dreams for me back in the day!), but she falls from a roof and she lies in a pool of her own blood. However, she invites the subject into her world, loaded on a disc, and we see her acting out violent scenes, and he is destined to live her life, but with a different outcome. Musically, there is a distinctly American AOR commercial vibe to this, something which has a range of sound all the way from Hall & Oates to Aerosmith.
Unbreakable is next, a couple meeting in a bar, immediately getting married, and signing up for the ultimate proof of love programme, signed with a tiny drop of blood. It is just short of seven minutes long but feels as if it packs in a huge amount in that relatively short time. I have embedded this one below, and I know you will enjoy the huge guitar solo in the opening segment prior to the main lyrical piece commencing. There are lulls of melody, but at its heart, this is a crashing, heavy, and extremely good slab of intelligent rock music.
Strange Places is a short instrumental with some gorgeous choral voices and synths alongside robotic effects creating a temple of the future. A little bit too short, really, I would have liked to see this extended.
He Is Number 4 is a story about how employee number 10 is about to blow up the factory where she works, but stops when she meets and falls in love with employee number 4, but obviously still holds designs on her ultimate destructive plan in a story which is one of the finest musical dark visions in recent times of a distinctly possible future where the modern complaint about workers only really being numbers on a spreadsheet to their corporate bosses is realised in terms of numbers replacing names, with beacons of fear in every workplace and situation, and the poor workers building a church for the holy ones, raising a tower of stone, lyrically a very good sequel to the instrumental piece which preceded it. Expansive and, I think, a track which really should be getting airplay on radio, it is embedded below.
Come Home is next, a call to leave someone who is not worthy and return home in a pretty acoustic guitar and mellotron minute of music.
The Secret Society of Goodness is the penultimate track, with two lovers observing a populace which ultimately wishes to destroy goodness, standing in the shadows waiting to pounce, but they are too weak to confront. Initially a keyboard-led piece of music, with some expansive soundscapes created, but a thumping rhythm section alongside some decent riffs in a frenetic track until at four minutes in, the band take a pause and a segment which takes a much darker note with madness and people losing hope, a guitar solo which aches before the riffs reassert themselves, but this time cynical and dystopian in their crashing impact.
We finish with Nothing Has Changed But Everything Is Different, another corking title. This is over eight minutes long but is another where certainly lyrically it seems to contain so much more, a tale of loss, absent fathers, Christmases past, and simply wanting love in a world that has changed, clinging to a silent lullaby. The vocals here are the best on the album, emotional and aching with sadness, the passage of the young child talking to mother accompanied by some throbbing repetitive notes, this continuing with increasing intensity, broken only by a gorgeous bass melody and synths as the space dream takes over, before the core emotion takes back control, with the cry of wanting to be loved by someone in a track which grows and grows with a great guitar solo and the noise surrounding the senses. The final ninety seconds are achingly beautiful, a joy to listen to.
This is an interesting album, certainly one is impressed by the storytelling throughout. Musically, it will appeal to those of you who like a well performed mix of classic rock, progressive music, and more melodic pop moments, and I, for one, will certainly be exploring more of this combo. You can do so by visiting their Bandcamp page at https://prehistoricanimals.bandcamp.com/