Blur
“Alex James…*sigh*…” – Wendy
“It’s a pretty horrible song…we killed it with too much catchiness.” – Graham Coxon, talking about “Country House”
“Maybe I’m the sort of person who asks for it because I sound quite arrogant when I talk.” – Damon Albarn
Albums Reviewed:
Blur is a band that needs no introduction whatsoever if you’re British and were alive and conscious in the mid-nineties, but since I’m American and thus the first Blur song I ever heard was freaking “Song 2” when I was in high school, please indulge me if you will. Along with the artistically inferior Oasis, Blur were the kings of the so-called “Britpop” movement in the mid-nineties over there on the island. Even though the bands were all sorts of different in all sorts of ways, including musically (Blur took artistic chances and changed their sound completely multiple times, including when they were at the peak of their commercial success, while Oasis…didn’t) and temperamentally (Damon Albarn is a self-consciously hip and artsy arrogant prick while Liam Gallagher is just an arrogant prick), the exceedingly silly British media constructed a class warfare-esque rivalry between the two bands that had little basis in reality (outside of Liam’s saying he wanted Alex James and Damon Albarn to get AIDS and die…) which culminated in the totally ridiculous scenario of the two bands’ releasing singles (“Roll With it” from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? And “Country House” from The Great Escape) on the same day. Of course, when Blur decided that they were too good to write British pop songs anymore and Oasis responded by continuing to suck at that same shriveled artistic teat until people stopped caring, that kind of killed the “Battle of Britpop,” but it was fun while it lasted, right? No, seriously, I don’t know, was it? I was listening to the Toadies all day back then.
In any case, I’ve obviously come to Blur a bit late, but I’ve grown to appreciate their contributions to the world of interesting guitar pop songs just as much as the next guy, if not quite as much as my girlfriend. They started out as one of roughly 6,781 bands in the late eighties/early nineties in Britain who wanted to sound just like the Stone Roses but weren’t any good at that, with the difference between Blur and the thousands of other such bands you haven’t heard of being that they quickly realized how much they blew at it. They then commenced their increasingly successful efforts at being a nineties version of the Kinks and writing self-consciously extremely British, interesting, melodic guitar pop about British people doing British things with a guy up front singing in a really thick British accent. Just like the Kinks, their sales in the States were not the strongest ever, and thus every person my age can hum half of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? from memory but probably can’t give you anything beyond “Oh, the band with the woo-hoo song?” if asked about the equally-successful-in-England-and-far-more-interesting Blur. This blows, of course, but I don’t think it keeps Graham Coxon up at night, and in any case the band did a total 180 after three albums of this British stuff and decided to follow the lead of their super-cool guitarist (of course he’s my favorite member of the band; don’t you know me by now?) by imitating noisy American indie rock (like Pavement, who for some reason is referenced in just about every damn thing I read about the band’s artistic shift even though Blur sounds not a damn thing like Pavement) instead of the Kinks. This led to an increasingly inconsistent output that moved further and further away from the band’s strengths until the guy that originally most wanted to push them away from Britpop (Coxon) left the band because he was upset that, for some godforsaken reason, Fatboy Fucking Slim was producing a Blur album (I mean, shit, wouldn’t you?). Blur then petered out with the messy electronic mishmash-cum-Damon Albarn solo album Think Tank, which actually isn’t as bad as everyone tells you. It does suck, though.
Lineup! In the picture above, from left to right, are lead singer Albarn, bassist and all-around hottie Alex James, lead guitarist Coxon and his conspicuously missing intellectual spectacles, and drummer and failed Labour Party candidate for Parliament Dave Rowntree, who for some reason is also missing his spectacles. Everyone above is good at what they do, even if Damon’s thickly accented voice will probably sound odd to you at first. Graham and his ever-increasing bag of tricks are probably the most interesting part of the band, but don’t sleep on the rhythm section. They get progressively better at holding it down pretty nice.
And, onto the reviews!
Leisure (1991)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “She’s So
High”
Debut album that sounds like a band that wants to sound like the Stone Roses but can’t pull it off. This is the “universal critical opinion” of Leisure, yes, but I didn’t start out this website to be different, you see. I started it out because I wanted a forum from which to release my semi-coherent ramblings and because I had no intention of starting a blog. As if people want to know what I ate for breakfast. You want to know what I ate for breakfast this morning? A nonfat yogurt. You want to know what I ate for breakfast the previous morning? A nonfat yogurt. That’s all I eat for breakfast. Ever. I’m a graduate student. I’m on a budget. I can’t afford luxuries like eggs benedict or toast. Plus I don’t even get up until 10 or so every day, so the idea of a “healthy breakfast that’s the most important meal of the day!” doesn’t really jive with my schedule of being as lazy as I possibly can. I don’t know how I got onto this topic. Perhaps I should have started a blog after all.
Listen, this album is extremely mediocre and uninteresting. In 1991 Blur had not yet discovered that they weren’t good at writing faux-shoegazer-British-drug music, so that’s what you’re gonna get here. The two hits were “She’s So High” and “There’s No Other Way,” or at least this is what I’m told because I’m from the states and thus the only Blur song I’ve ever heard on the radio is “Song 2,” which may be the most uncharacteristically “Blur” song in the band’s entire catalog. “She’s So High” is a relatively harmless and simple pop song with possibly the only memorable melody on the entire album, so that one’s pretty good relative to the rest of the stuff here (though to say it pales in comparison to later Blur triumphs would be an understatement akin to saying “I think Barack Obama may be a slightly more impressive public figure than George W. Bush and I am optimistic that he may be a superior president”). The remaining passable material consists of stuff that sounds way too much like the Stone Roses, like the admittedly well-riffed “There’s No Other Way,” the reasons for whose “hit-ness” I can almost understand more than “She’s So High,” and “Bang,” which would be great if it didn’t sound exactly like “There’s No Other Way,” but with a less interesting melody and less intriguing riff structure. There are like three other songs on the record that sound exactly like this, too, though I can’t recall which titles they correspond to at this point (you’re not missing anything). I know, the Stone Roses were popular back in the day, and I know they could work up a nice little quasi-dance, quasi-psychedelic “Madchester” stew there, but their style is very fucking redundant and very fucking uninteresting if not done well. Let Leisure be evidence of this.
Hell,
though, at least on the Stone Roses songs they sound perfectly listenable. I can tolerate that stuff, you see, even if
it all sounds the same. Too often the
band at this early stage in their career seems to think that the way to get
through to the psychedelic kiddies was to play slow, over-distorted riffs that
go nowhere and dispassionately intone lyrics with no melody over them. A fair chunk of this album is just bad.
And not in an “I don’t like this style” way (which they never really do;
I like the Stone Roses) or a “they
have no originality and are simply producing a weak facsimile of a far superior
band” way (which, as previously discussed, we do get a lot of), but in a “it’s not clear that this band is 100%
clear on the principles of songwriting” kind of way. “Slow Down” is an example of this. What exactly is the point of this song? I hear muddy guitar gunk with no riff, I hear
Dave Rowntree struggling to come up with a drum part that can carry whatever
the guitar gunk is trying to be and failing, I hear some sort of “fast” bridge
with “ahh ahh ahhh” and “ooo oo ooooo” things that makes no sense whatsoever,
and in the end I hear nothing worth listening to at all. I’d also like nominate “Fool” as a contender
for worst song on the album, due mainly to the part in what I suppose is the
bridge where the band tries to “rock,” and in so doing instructs Dave Rowntree
to start indiscriminately playing snare fills that completely lose the beat every single time to support Graham
Coxon’s doing something that I think is supposed to mimic the drum fills but
ends up just sounding like no one bothered to actually write a bridge. Like they
decided to just fuck it and play a bunch of random notes for thirty
seconds. This album is not Dave
Rowntree’s finest hour, but sometimes he has so little to work with I can’t
even blame him. How do you construct a
drum part for a bunch of random, rhythmless sludge?
It’s not like half of the
album is as bad as that, at least. If it
were, I wouldn’t have been so generous as to type a 5 above this review. Much of the material was clearly written by
semi-competent human begins but is nevertheless simply boring. “Repetition” at least has verses that don’t
totally suck, but the chorus amps up the indistinguishable distortion and lack
of energy to levels nearly unprecedented on this album. Songs such as “Birthday” and “Sing” (I have
the British version, which means the U2-frontloaded American running order that
has “She’s So High” and “There’s No Other Way” going 1-2 is thankfully absent
for me, as well as whatever “I Know” sounds like) are content just to wallow in
their own sluggish faux-drugginess and don’t even get bad enough to piss me
off, which I guess is good compared to “Fool” or something, but I must say I prefer
the songs that just sound like the Stone Roses to this nonsense. Like “High Cool.” Why yes, that does sound like a half-assed Stone Roses B-side! Very much indeed!
In conclusion, this album’s not very good, but if you have any knowledge of Britpop you probably knew that already. I suppose it’s understandable, though. Blur were really young and were just trying to sound like the popular style. Hell, David Bowie did that for a fucking decade before he got good, didn’t he? Whatever. I can safely say I will never listen to this record again once I’m done writing this review.
Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “For
Tomorrow”
Good enough that I won’t be sitting here spewing invective at it for any appreciable length of time, but not good enough that I have any kind of warm, fuzzy feelings for it that would lead me to praise it too actively either. This one is just sort of there. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a pretty nice piece of work and a drastic improvement over the sloppy, underwritten Leisure – I just sort of wish I was British and/or my Britpop-obsessed girlfriend and thus could give you some sort of Big Statement about how this album ushered in Britpop or whatever. Supposedly it did, but in 1993 I was busy listening to Nirvana and being eleven years old, so I didn’t happen to notice. Plus there’s the whole fact that Blur’s next two albums do what this one was trying to do so obviously better and more snappily that to make any Big Statement about Lakers Fans are Rubbish would seem like a disservice to Parklife and The Great Escape (of Kobe Bryant from rape charges). I’ve come to this whole Britpop thing late in the game, you see (though not so late that I don’t harbor a somewhat irrational loathing for Oasis). I have nothing personally invested in the genre. If it wasn’t for my girlfriend I probably would have never bothered listening to Blur in the first place, and I certainly wouldn’t be reviewing them. But I like them! I do! I just don’t have a lot of interesting or insightful comments to make about this particular record album. And no, this isn’t all that different from most of my reviews, I know.
As with the last album, I echo the chorus of reviewers in complimenting Damon, Graham and the others for quickly realizing they sucked at imitating the Stone Roses and instead deciding to write actual guitar-pop songs with melodies and such. Much has been said about the contrast between some of the seemingly happy melodies and the “biting, satirical” lyrics (such as the ironic “la la la” chorus in “For Tomorrow”). Since I don’t know what life was like for people older than eleven in 1993, let alone people older than eleven in Britain in 1993, and since I’m not enthusiastic enough about this album to bother to read the lyrics and think about the relevant questions here, I’m just gonna say “yeah, there’s that, and I suppose that’s interesting.” What’s important is the music, anyway, and you’ll all be happy to know that this record commences Blur’s happy tradition of making albums too long and sticking all their best songs in the first half. This is not frontloading in the “Let’s write three great singles, make them the first three tracks of the album, and then mail in the rest” U2 sense, mind you – until they abandoned Britpop and began to have progressively more difficulty writing interesting songs that don’t sound bad, they were pretty good about keeping their momentum going for at least 30-35 minutes before abandoning the second half to mediocrity, so they’re not maddening, just kind of annoying. Nevertheless, the tendency’s there, so if you want to turn off the album after “Chemical World,” you can be safe in the knowledge that you won’t miss too much.
Starts off pretty good, though, I suppose. “For Tomorrow” is an interesting one, light and snappy and energetic and showing nice bags of creativity and whatnot. It has some melodies, you know? This is good, because remember that Leisure generally had trouble with this important aspect of songwriting. This isn’t Parklife or Great Escape-level stuff yet, but we’re getting there, even if the crunchy, not-so-interesting riff prevalent in the otherwise perfectly nice “Advert” reminds us that this is the band that made that silly Leisure album with that silly dependence on go-nowhere guitar noise at the expense of songs. The “say something…say something else!” echo-ey chorus is nice, though, I guess. Like “For Tomorrow,” it registers in my brain as “good,” and yet I’m not always able to make that jump from “yes, this is good” to “yes, I enjoy this” so much. A lot of the album’s first half is like that, actually. The intro bit to “Colin Zeal,” for instance, is quite nice – with the little chimey guitar thing and almost wah-wah overdub there, but I’m not sitting here humming along like I do for analogous tracks on the next two albums. Maybe it’s that the chorus throws in another needlessly fuzzy guitar doing too little interesting to warrant my attention, I don’t know. I think it’s that the melodies still have another level to go – like, they’re here now, and they’re done well-enough that I can give this album (or half of it) a nice pat on the back, but Blur’s not churning out perfect pop nuggets like “Charmless Man” yet, you see. Even though they’re nominally different in tempo and whatnot, the first four songs (including the less entertaining fits and starts of “Pressure on Julian”) on here end up blending into a kind of decent mush that exposes the lack of diverse, interesting instrumentation and mood the album has. This is a problem they’d correct on the next one, of course, and they even start to correct it in the next few tracks – witness the sprightly, straightforward pop of “Star Shaped” (whose melody nevertheless is not quite good enough to unseat the oboe solo as my favorite moment of the song…and of course, the oboe solo is answered by a distorted guitar not being awesome…listen, Graham, you’re not good at generic distorted riffs, OK?) and the lethargic yet nicely melodic mood piece “Blue Jeans.” I’ll say it again: they’re getting there. They’re just not there yet.
Like I said before, you can more or less skip most of the second half. Much of it is OK, at least – only the massive distortion wall of sound in lieu of a song that is “Oily Water” and whatever the fuck “Miss America” is supposed to be (it literally sounds like someone’s taking a piss – by which I do not mean “fucking around,” but “urinating”) blow without qualification. Hell, there’s not a lot wrong with a lot of the perfectly OK guitar pop songs that we find here, except that they fail to leave much of an impression on the listener and thus must be dismissed as mediocre because if a song’s really good, shouldn’t I fucking remember it after fifteen listens? That’s not too much to ask, right? “Sunday Sunday” tries to cover up a weak melody with gobs of production and horns and stuff, “Villa Rosie” does nothing that “Chemical World” didn’t do (not that I’ve actually talked about that one – ha!), “Coping” does nothing that the first four songs didn’t do (and I had to click on the damn thing again even to remember that), and “Turn it Up” is nice but ultimately lacking in, I dunno, oomph? That’s subjective, I know, but it’s not like there’s a correct answer in music criticism. Except “The Killers are not a good band.” That’s a correct answer.
The album leaves you with a few minutes of sweet yet repetitive echoey guitar/accordion pleasantness called (aptly enough) “Repetition” and a minute of useless heavy guitar feedback distortion unpleasantness that Graham Coxon still sucks balls at called “Commercial Break.” Neither of these tracks is gonna change the rating any, so eh. This one’s the stereotypical “nice but forgettable” record. You’ll probably like it and find it interesting. You’ll probably go and listen to Parklife and The Great Escape and then not listen to this one again because you actually walk around humming the songs on those albums instead of objectively believing that they’re not bad but having no emotional stake in the proceedings. And then you’ll listen to Arthur or Village Green Preservation Society or something and realize the Kinks kind of ruled.
Parklife (1994)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Badhead”
Really good album that would be great if it was just able to cut 20 minutes off the end, which can also be said about The Great Escape and really every other Blur album from this point on (provided they’re as good as Parklife or The Great Escape…which, of course, none of them are). What Blur’s been able to do here is complete the transformation from “mediocre guitar noise band playing a style they inherently blow at” to “extremely interesting guitar-pop melody-producers who make you think too, you know?” that they were like two-thirds of the way through on Modern Life is Bullshit (Sorry, Damon: as an Am-ur-ican who likes his trucks as artificially oversized and unwieldy as his tits, I don’t use the word “rubbish”). What makes their completion of this transformation even more interesting is that a bunch of the songs either make the increasingly excellent guitar doodling of Mr. Coxon only the second or third-most important musical ingredient in a particular song or barely have any guitar at all! How else do you explain the biggest hit from the record (I think? I have no personal experience with this, remember: this is simply what I’m led to believe), the eighties Brit-dance disco rip bounce-fest “Girls and Boys?” Yeah, Coxon’s doing some noisy stuff in there, but it’s not like it matters. This isn’t even really a “guitar-pop” band anymore. It’s just a pop band that happens to need to use guitars for a number of the styles they choose to write pop songs in. I may be overselling this point, since most of the other top tunes are certainly guitar-based, and a lot of the “other” stuff occurs in the sometimes outright weird second half, but considering what they came from and considering they’d go right back to straight guitar pop on their next album (though it’d be really fucking good guitar pop by then), I just find songs like “Girls and Boys” and the French lounge pop ballad oddity “To the End” interesting, you know? Sometimes I’m not sure how much I even like large chunks of this album (for instance, “Girls and Boys” straddles the line dividing “fantastic” and “simply annoying” so closely I’m still not entirely certain there), but it always fascinates me more than any other Blur album. I shouldn’t have to add that this is a good thing.
Of course, just like Modern Life (and Great Escape, and….), Parklife provides the listener two entirely separate short albums, one which provides a generally very positive listening experience for six or seven songs or so, and another which provides a disappointingly inconsistent 30-35 minutes. On Modern Life, the dividing line occurred, appropriately enough, at a track called “Intermission” (I like how Blur themselves were more aware than anyone of how much weaker the second half of that album was), and this time you can start letting your mind wander if you wish at the oddball polka instrumental “The Debt Collector.” The only song preceding this album’s intermission that doesn’t blow away everything produced by Blur up to this point is the relatively inconsequential fast punker “Bank Holiday,” but hell, it’s not like I don’t enjoy that one. It’s just over before I realize it started. Many people enjoy discoursing for long periods of time on the fabulous “Beatle-esque” guitar pop ballad “End of the Century” (which really is lovely, and may the best-constructed song here in a purely melodic sense) and the brilliant, hilarious and incredibly simple title track, which consists of little more than the guy who played Jimmy in the movie version of Quadrophenia (seriously…and for a band so self-aware of their own reliance on their forebears, how cool is that?) narrating the daily life of an average, ‘umble, British-person, heavy accent and all, over a three-chord riff that was probably copyrighted in a garage in England sometime in the fifties and certainly does the “life of average, ‘umble British-persons” thematic thing better than anything else here. Despite the monstrous length of that sentence, I will not do such a thing, and will instead focus for a bit on the excellent ballad “Badhead,” which may be my favorite Blur song outside of the two totally out-of-place career masterpieces on 13. Damon’s subdued vocals perfectly fit the resigned lyrics (“It’s no surprise that today I get up around two, from a lack of anything to do…”), while musically it does nothing flashy (like the boing-boing bass in “Girls and Boys,” for instance), but just so many beautiful subtle things to match the perfect melody, from the lowly mixed horns (I think) at the beginning (and throughout) to whatever wind instrument that is (or hell, is it a keyboard?) doing the little trill thing to all these clever little harmonic runs and crap that I have no idea about that Graham always does (dig especially the ascending lines in the guitar solo) to this little “thwack-a-wack” thing that I swear comes from a harpsichord (or a keyboard imitating a harpsichord) before Damon sings the chorus the last time. Just a lot of brilliant little sounds and melodic runs coming from instruments mixed low enough that I can’t tell all the time what instrument they even are. I shouldn’t have to add that this is a good thing, either.
Like I
said, after “Badhead” the album becomes decidedly hit-or-miss. That “To the End” thing I mentioned earlier
is probably a highlight, as well as the lovely “Clover over
So Blur manage to turn out a very strong album full of diverse classic British pop styles, some guitar-based, some not, and since it’s the nineties and albums just have to be an hour long now, manage to produce a handful of throwaways that were probably better left thrown away. So it goes. Despite my total lack of personal connection to anything Damon is actually singing about (although the lyrics to “Badhead” do ring a bell or two…), I certainly dig a lot of this stuff a lot. No matter the context, you can always recognize musical creativity, you know? It’s not like we’re dealing with Radiohead here, but Blur could definitely hack it quite nice.
The Great Escape (1995)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Charmless
Man”
Third and final installment in Damon and co’s “Life as a British-person” trilogy, with the difference that, since Parklife sold more copies than god and Blur came into a bit of money, Damon’s singing about rich people! Makes total sense if you think about it – write about what you know, right? And now that Damon knows money he’s writing about it. Fine. As long as the band remembers to bring the musical goods at a level equal to or exceeding Parklife, I suppose it’s fine by this poor graduate student, and thankfully they do. Unlike the last one, though, with its boingy disco-dance and spoken-word ‘umble British-isms and French lounge pop and rampant stylistic diversity, The Great Sexxxscape for the most part does away with this and instead provides the listener with a bunch of happy-sounding, bouncy pop songs that sound like Blur mixed in with a couple of ballads that sound like Blur.
This isn’t a retread of the nice but ultimately forgettable Modern Life, though – nope, Damon’s songwriting has advanced nicely since then, and I don’t think many people would debate my saying that this is probably Blur’s tightest record, just in terms of the melodic construction of the songs. I’m not sure if it’s as interesting as Parklife, but as a straight pop album it certainly works better than its predecessor. Some of the songs in the first part of the album are just pop of the highest quality, especially the excellent “Charmless Man,” which is as close to a “perfect pop nugget” as Blur ever got. Bouncy, snappy, musically interesting, full of well-done melodic twists and turns, and all over in not much over three minutes. I even dig the “na na na” vocal bit in there, which is just about a perfect encapsulation of the light-hearted but mean-spirited sarcastic dig that the song is – like when you’re a kid and you go “nya nya nya!” at some other kid because you think this makes you cool (it doesn’t). The “na na na” bit is just like that, but the tenor of the song is so fun and catchy that it works. Other winners in this vein include the bouncy “Country House” and the opener “Stereotypes,” which is a bit odder than the others (principally with its keyboards) but no less snappy. I guess you could say these songs are just a “type” that Damon’s become good at, and that Parklife didn’t have anything like a “type” and thus The Great Escape can go fuck itself, but if that “type” produces such fun results, what’s the big deal? Don’t forget who you’re dealing with here. I like snappy pop songs, dammit.
The album’s first half, if lacking songs as intriguing as “Parklife” and “Badhead,” is probably more consistent in the melody department than its predecessors. The ballads “Best Days” and (especially) “The Universal” do the job nicely, and I can’t help but enjoy the mildly chaotic horn-driven “Fade Away” either. And sure, the whistling in “Top Man” nicks the melody from the “na na na” part of “Charmless Man” (which was, what, two tracks ago?), but I’m gonna go ahead and (completely subjectively) interpret that as “thematic unity” (because this album’s supposed to have that, isn’t it?) instead of being really lazy (of course, if this were Oasis or U2 or some band I’m actively biased against, I’d interpret it the other way; hooray for subjectivity!). Plus the rest of the song is pretty bad-ass, so what are you gonna do? I especially dig the low-pitched “boww” or whatever that thing is that sounds like a bunch of guys with low voices getting hit in the chest or something. Pretty good.
Track 8, “Mr. Robinson’s Quango,” is the point on this album where (like every Blur album ever) the quality of the material on display takes a noticeable dip. Now, like Parklife, it’s not like the second half is bad. It’s just not up to snuff. “Quango,” for instance,” is another one of those happy, bouncy Britpop songs with horns that Damon can’t seem to get enough of, but since the melody’s B-level at best, the band decides to take the song through a bunch of annoyingly herky-jerky left turns that do not help the song’s inherent melodic deficiency one bit. Some of the songs back here are slow for the sake of being slow (“He Thought of Cars”), some are fast for the sake of being fast (“Globe Alone”), and some are downright weird for the sake of being downright weird (“Ernold Same,” which actually out-weirds everything on Parklife). I can get behind “It Could be You” as a nice enough guitar rocker with a catchy-enough riff, but it’s not the most memorable song I’ve heard in my life, and I’m also gonna throw bit of support behind the repetitive quasi-dance song “Entertain Me,” but not with large amounts of enthusiasm. The atmospheric closer “Yuko & Hiro” is more random than anything – at least before the Japanese ladies come in, that is, at which point it becomes downright incomprehensible until you remember that Damon Albarn has probably heard Scary Monsters more than a few times in his life.
So which album do I like more, Parklife or The Great Escape? Until I start wading into the later material and deciding whether I like it or not, that’s really the big Blur question, isn’t it? Leisure sucks, Modern Life is a weaker version of the two that came after it, and the last three are a completely different animal entirely (and if someone thinks 13 or Think Tank is the best Blur album, then they’re on another musical taste planet and really shouldn’t be part of this discussion). In the end, to be honest, I don’t know which one I like better. I’ve been back and forth on it a bunch of times, and if put at gunpoint (as if that would happen) I’d probably nominate The Great Escape, just because of its greater consistency and melodic content, but Parklife succeeds at a range of styles so much wider than that tried on The Great Escape that it’s tough to ignore it (plus “Badhead” is just so bad-ass). Both have failures in the second half, but those on Parklife are probably more interesting failures, at least…you know what? Fuck it. It’s a wash. They’re equally good and equally flawed. The important thing is that Geddy Lee doesn’t sing on either of them.
Blur (1997)
Rating: 7
Best Song:
“Beetlebum”
The abrupt 180 away from Britpop that was probably a hay-uuuuge deal in Britain but only caused a ripple here in a Retard-land, and only then due to that “Woo-hoo” song that was Blur’s first (and only) hit stateside (and the only Blur tune on Not Exactly’s playlist, though if the band ever gets reformed for whatever reason you know I’m pushing for “Coffee & TV”). In reading reviews about this album, it has slowly dawned on me just how big a chance Blur were taking in completely altering their style when they were at their commercial and artistic peak, so I’m gonna go ahead and compliment them on this retroactively because I didn’t get to listen to their albums until 2008. Of course, now that they’ve entrenched themselves in American indie rock instead of updating Kinks music about ‘umble British-persons for the nineties, they obviously begin to sound a little more familiar to someone like me – this is more the kind of music I would usually listen to, you see, mainly because I’m American and I tend to enjoy various kinds of “indie rock,” and my girlfriend (forever underestimating me…) even said I’d probably like Blur and 13 more once I got into the band – but this doesn’t necessarily mean Blur’s gotten better. They’ve just gotten, you know, different. And worse. But they’re still pretty good. For half the album. No, that hasn’t changed.
First of all, the opener “Beetlebum” is by far the best song on the record, and anyone who says otherwise is probably one of those people who shout out “Play the woo-hoo song!!!!!!!!!” at Blur concerts (they exist, I’m told). The way that the guitar intro is off the beat but you don’t notice until the drums come in is brilliant, and the whole thing has this loping, weary, a little off, yet insistently catchy tone that is probably what the band was going for on like half the album but at which they only fully succeed here. The totally different, almost dreamy chorus is superb as well, and a great contrast – the way the video does it, when it pans away from the close-up of Damon’s face to a panoramic shot of the planet, is just about accurate. The groove is very simple, yet the outro where it keeps getting repeated with all the guitar effects that sound like ferrets are munching on Graham’s cords is one of those things where it could probably go on for ten minutes and it would be totally OK. You know, like “Coffee & TV” from the next album, only not as awesome. But still pretty awesome.
It’s great to have a kick-ass lead-off track and all, but the bad thing is that the remaining 50+ minutes are never gonna be as good as that, and such is the case here – although it’s not like you shouldn’t be used to diminishing returns on a Blur album by now. Once I realized that “Song 2” was a sarcastic dig against the type of music it represents and was put on the album to attract people who wouldn’t realize it’s making fun of them, then I dug it and found it nicely catchy, but if you don’t know this you probably find it annoying (but maybe you like it now!). As I alluded to before, the first side is again where you’ll find the lion’s share of the worthwhile material (and in this album’s case, pretty much all of it). Most of the best stuff is good mainly because of Graham’s guitar tricks, because now that the band is trying to be all ironic and indie they’ve skimped on the immediately memorable melodies that were so prevalent on the last two albums (with the exception of “Beetlebum,” of course). I dig “On Your Own,” then, mostly for the fantastically frigged-out guitar intro with all the squeals and stutters and wavering and everything (even if it vaguely reminds me of “Magic America” from Parklife), and could give or take the main melody (which consists mostly of Damon’s shouting). Same deal with “M.O.R.” – brilliant squeaky guitar riff and intro with the piano, but the actual song is just, you know, OK. And “Country Sad Ballad Man” – dig the dynamics changes in there from the bendy acoustics at the beginning to the squealy swirling effects box loveliness of the climax at the end. The one song that I dig for melodic reasons instead of Graham’s cool guitar tricks is, ironically enough, Graham’s – the extremely intentionally lo-fi (There are scratching sounds like it’s an LP from the thirties!) “You’re So Great.” I listened to the album like ten times before I really noticed it, but it’s a nice little unpretentious song with a nice little unpretentious melody and a nice little unpretentious acoustic chord sequence. I also like how Graham sings about “tea, tea and coffee.” Did the man just really like caffeine? I need to get some of his solo material to see if all of his songs talk about coffee and not just the two that I know are his on Blur albums. Or I could just listen to more Cheap Trick albums. Either way.
“Death of a Party” marks the transition from “good half” to “bad half” this time (with the more or less useless instrumental “Theme from Retro” somehow squeezing into the good half this time), and a half-hour of mediocre wannabe-American indie rock is actually less interesting to talk about than a half-hour of mediocre Britpop. Once this album gets into its second half, I tend to lose interest very quickly. Usually the one-two punch of the go-nowhere “atmospheric” “Death of a Party” and the headache-inducing noise-for-the-sake-of-noise “Chinese Bombs” is enough to turn me off. Like the last few albums, though, the bad half is rarely really bad – just not good – and at least the band still have the desire to put mediocre songs on the second half of their albums instead of mediocre quasi-electronic, boring non-songs. “Look Inside America,” with its swirling strings and obvious attempts to be melodic and everything, almost seems like it’s on the wrong album, for instance, and “Movin’ On” is at least some kickin’ guitar rock with noise effects and stuff, but eh. The two songs with long names I don’t want to type out barely register and the closing experimental thing “Essex Dogs” would probably be better if it didn’t register either. Blur have completely changed their style of music, but their style of album sequencing remains defiantly the same.
Really, as much as this admittedly is a total 180 style-wise for the band, Blur is still Blur is still Blur. They still write guitar pop songs, with the difference being this time that they embellish things with Graham’s now very large bag of tricks instead of, you know, other instruments, and the music is more subdued and much less self-consciously British. But they’re still guitar-pop songs, you know? And there’s still about the same ratio of good to not-as-good as before, and the good and not-as-good are stuck in the same places on the album as before. A sixty-minute Blur album of guitar pop songs is only gonna reach a certain level of quality, and now that the style of those guitar-pop songs is a little out of the comfort zone the band had established for itself, that maximum level of quality is gonna drop a bit. Hence Blur. I still like it, and I definitely find it more interesting than Modern Life, but eh. After “Beetlebum” is done, it’s sorta just another Blur album.
13 (1999)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Coffee
& TV”
A boring and tedious album of depressing, overlong non-songs resulting in equal parts from Damon’s breakup with Elastica girl and the band’s continued desire to sound as little like they did when they were the Kings of Britpop as possible. Oddly, in the midst of this mushy mess of whatever the hell they were going for at the time you’ll find the two best songs the band ever did (and it’s really not even close), one of which results from that same breakup with said Elastica girl that probably contributed heavily to how draggy and underwhelming the rest of this thing sounds. Seriously, have you heard “Tender?” What a goddamn song. It sounds like Blur crossed with the Rolling Stones in full-on “Moonlight Mile” epic awesome. Love the hissy LP and old guitar beginning, and I’ve never heard (and never will again) hear Damon so honest and heartbreaking in both his lyrics and delivery. And sure, he has to cart in the black women back-up singers to augment his voice for the “Come on, come on, come on! Get thruuuuu it!” chorus, but fuck me if that’s not one of the most effective uses of the generic black women back-up singers I’ve ever heard. The song (guitar melodies, understated percussion, vocals, mood…the whole thing, really) is so perfectly done that the big black chorus back there can’t help but add to the atmosphere. “Oh my baby…oh my baby…oh my…oh why?” Seriously, listen to this thing. Oasis could never even get in the ballpark of something this good. They’re like the Jets to Blur’s Patriots. It’s not even fucking close.
But because I’m a simple man who likes simple things, I like Graham’s masterpiece of pop bliss “Coffee & TV” better. So sue me. It’s an extremely simple song, consisting of not much more than a jangle-ja-jangle guitar riff that rolls off an interesting but not mind-blowing chord sequence, extremely straightforward 4/4 rhythm work, and Graham’s understated vocals, with the occasional keyboard or guitar noise bits holding off until the song is about half-over. On its surface, nothing special, really, and objectively perhaps it’s no “Tender.” Of course, how much early Beatles material was all that much outside of the melodies and songcraft? And yeah, the melody here really is good enough to bring up the “B” word. You listen to like two minutes of it once and you’ll be humming it for weeks. “So give me coffee and TV…peeaaaacefullyyyyy…” I don’t know why it took Blur nearly a decade to come up with the best pure pop melody of their career, I don’t know why it was actually Graham Coxon who did it, and I don’t know why they had to stick it on an album so otherwise bereft of actual melody, but it is what it is, I suppose. The video with the little anthropomorphic milk carton, which may be one of the best I’ve ever seen even if it is almost insufferably cute, just seals it. Perfect.
Unfortunately,
there’s the rest of the album. There’s
not even a “good/bad” cutoff point this time because that would imply that half
of the album is good. If you want a
cutoff point, it would be after “Coffee & TV” segues into the purposefully
ugly and off-putting “Swamp Song,” which may be my least favorite “song” on the
entire record, but that means the cutoff point comes after track three, and the song in between track 1
(“Tender”) and track 3 (“Coffee & TV”) isn’t good either. I suppose I’ll give “Bugman” credit for, you
know, being a song, but by 13 Blur
had developed this nasty habit of making any “fast” “rock” track they do as
fuzzy, ugly, and bad-sounding as
possible, and “Bugman” is just more evidence of it. Does the guitar really need to be that fuzzy? Do the vocals? Does the whole thing have to eschew any
considerations toward sounding pleasant on the ear to pass the new “hip test”
that Damon has apparently implemented?
And hell, the riff isn’t even all that good. I’ve seen it cited as a rip of
Elsewhere,
most of the material either does little to get noticed or, failing that, is
only noticed for sounding ugly. In the
latter camp is “B.L.U.R.E.M.I.,” which is just an overly fast mishmash of bad
ideas with too much fuzz layered on top that needs to go away. “No Distance Left to Run” is often cited as
the “third good song” on the record (no, I’m not alone in my love for “Tender”
and “Coffee & TV” at the expense of everything else), and I’ll respect its
sorta “Tender”-esque sad guitar melodies and back-up singers and efforts to be
an actual song with a chorus and everything, but if you’re looking to this to
get your rocks off, you’ve got problems.
It would definitely be part of the “mediocre half” or Parklife or The Great Escape had Damon written it five years earlier. It’s just too underdeveloped. The stretch from “
Listen, this is not a good record. I’ve granted it a 6 because, somehow, it has Blur’s only two unqualified musical masterpieces within its ranks, but the rest of the album fails pretty badly. Once “Coffee & TV” is done, I’m not sure if I like the last fifty or so minutes any better or worse than the fifty minutes of Think Tank, which pretty much everyone agrees sucks to holy hell. And yeah, I’m serious: I don’t think 13, minus “Tender” and “Coffee & TV,” is any better than Think Tank. Part of this might be because I don’t think Think Tank sucks as much scrote as the majority seems to think, but it’s not like I think Think Tank is good. It doesn’t even have fucking Graham Coxon on it! How good could it be? Whatever. “Tender” and “Coffee & TV” are the two best songs Blur ever put out. The rest of the album is not.
Think Tank (2003)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “Out Of
Time”
Not as soul-suckingly bad as it’s cracked up to be, but still messy as hell and not at all good. The stuff I had read about the Graham Coxon-deficient Think Tank, in which Damon decides it’s a good idea to take up lead guitar duties himself when he’s able to bring roughly 0.1% of Graham’s bag of tricks to the table, had me bracing for some sort of Black Tie White Noise or Zooropa-esque exercise in electronic complete failure at everything before I clicked “play” on it for the first time. And while yeah, it’s still Blur’s worst album (barely beating out Leisure for that prestigious honor), I’m not gonna sit here and join the chorus of those who want to call it nothing more than the sounds of Damon’s flushing his band’s entire career down the toilet.
I know, it’s underdeveloped and it’s nonsensical and it’s boring and it’s stupid and it employs about five too many self-consciously trendy electronic (and otherwise) clichés which were obviously all Damon’s idea after he became all hot shit in America with Gorillaz (who, you know, blow). I will argue none of these points. Still, I don’t think it’s terrible. I even find a few acceptable melodies in the first few tracks here, which is funny because it’s on this album that Damon officially decides that writing a melody is now above him. They just occasionally seep through anyway. I actually enjoy most of the mellow “Out of Time” and find it quite lovely, while the opening “Ambulance” is at least a decent example of the kind of sulky, post-Radiohead, quasi-electronic, non-dance stew that Damon probably intended a lot more of the album to be. And “Good Song,” while lacking in much to grab onto and way too similar in tone and atmosphere to “Out of Time,” is at least pretty, isn’t it? These songs (and yeah, I can at least call these tracks “songs”) aren’t gonna change anyone’s world or even remain in anyone’s consciousness too much after they’re done because of their dogged refusal to develop the hooks they may have or be exciting at all, but come on, are they that bad? They’re fine.
No, they don’t have any interesting guitar work in them, but none of the rest of the album does either. Damon Albarn is playing guitar! What do you expect? The only time you hear a guitar here outside of some of that really soft atmospheric nothing guitar in “Out of Time” or whatever is when Damon decides to do a terrible “fast, fuzzy song” like “We’ve Got a File on You” (a punk song that hates punk music) or “Crazy Beat” (an atrocious song that just hates music, with production from Fatboy Slim). Graham’s gone, so this is the Damon show, you know? Thank god the rhythm section is still doing a good job, or “On the Way to the Club” wouldn’t be as decently tolerable as it is for long stretches. Same goes for the gospel-y “Brothers and Sisters,” which really should suck to holy hell but ends up only sucking mildly because of a few nice bass lines.
Bass lines are what save this album from total ass-ness sometimes – the aforementioned opener “Ambulance” is good example of this, and the only songs missing a big, loud, up-front bass that aren’t horrendous are “Out of Time” and “Good Song.” And yes, I know I already mentioned those songs too. This is still a Blur album, remember? What kind of Blur album would it be if it didn’t have all the best (though in this case “best” is a term I use with great hesitation) material clumped at the start of the album? Once “On the Way to the Club” finishes up, there’s not much left to cite as stuff I can even kind of enjoy. I still don’t know what “Caravan” sounds like, for instance, and “Jets” is literally six and a half minutes of nothing happening at all outside of a ridiculous saxophone solo. The reviews that tear this album apart totally miss the point – this album is less a flabbergasting embarrassment than an exercise in total boredom. Even the stuff I like – “Ambulance,” “Out of Time,” maybe “Good Song,” bits of “On the Way to the Club” – admittedly has a tendency to just suck all of the excitement out of the room. In all of his self-conscious “hipness” and conscious avoiding of truly memorable hooks, Damon Albarn has made an album so uneventful that it can probably put you to sleep (at least outside of the two “fast, fuzzy” songs, which are undoubtedly the two worst on the album). This is better than jumping up and down, waving its arms, and actively sucking giant balls, yes, but it’s still not the best quality an album can have.
There’s more I could probably say about Think Tank, and I’ve left most of the second side totally un-commented upon, but really, who cares? My only original contribution to criticism of this album is “it doesn’t suck as bad as it’s supposed to,” but it’s not like I’m recommending the thing. Who in their right mind wants a Blur album without Graham Coxon, anyway? That’s like a Radiohead album without Jonny Greenwood or a Gwar album without that guy with the giant latex phallus. There’s a reason no one bought this, and the only reason people are talking about them again now is that they’re reuniting with Graham Coxon. So yeah, you can avoid this one. Even considering it, I still like these guys better than fucking Oasis, though.