NME Don't pretend you saw it coming. In fact, don't even bother going back and combing the grooves looking for it. Because just as no-one could have guessed that the authors of 'Love Me Do' and 'Please Please Me' would within five years come up with 'A Day In The Life' or 'Helter Skelter', there was nothing in 'She's So High or 'Bang' to suggest wonders as glorious and diverse as 'This Is A Low' or 'Girls And Boys'. You suspect that not even Blur themselves couldn't have dreamed of 'The Great Escape'. For when we first met Blur they were terminally of-the-moment. Even their name was a label invention, for Christ's sake, calculated to say as little as possible, offend no-one and fit into whatever trend was available. Five years ago there seemed little doubt that, as NME put it in reviewing their debut album, "Blur are merely the present of rock'n'roll". 'Popscene' should have told us that Blur were different. It ranted, waved and drowned around the turn of 1991/92, as the butt-ends of fraggle, shoegazing and baggy were being stubbed out by the grunge invasion. Spitting contrary attitude and prickly personality, pogoing in rolled up jeans, Fred Perrys and V-neck jumpers, and biting back at the hands that had under-fed them, suddenly Blur were out on their own. It was the moment they began setting the scene instead of being shackled by it, the moment they began defining the zeitgeist. It carved the first scrapings of a niche in British music, established permanently with a parochial identity-stamp and rekindled love affair with London and its mod heritage that was 'Modern Life Is Rubbish'. That in turn was magnified tenfold by the semi-detached celebration/indictment of mass consumer culture, and the thoughts of a 25-year-old everyman that was 'Parklife'. Now we can only demand a masterpiece. And they've damn near delivered it. 'The Great Escape' is a spectacularly accomplished, sumptuous, heart-stopping and inspirational album. It sees a Blur who've achieved what they strove so doggedly for, and who are on top of the world (or London, at least) looking down on creation for any explanations they can find. Or more importantly for some glimmer of hope, empathy and love amid the mess of pre-millennial mediocrity, homogeneity and gloom they see around them. And the more it sucks you in, the more you realise it's shot through with a schizophrenia that has evidently been encroaching on Mr Albarn since he last opened his heart to us. Every aspect of modern life Damon (whose vision, for the most part, this record realises) was able to observe - detached, with a smug, sneer-tinged affection on 'Parklife' - he now sees haunting his own life in one way or another. Yuppie stress, impending madness, professional drudgery, no escape from mundane stereotype, the goofy drunken 'besht mate', loneliness, acceptance of grateful second best. To take up the given theme, everyone's scrambling for an escape, our hero included. Even the hung-over personal confessions sound more confused and desperate than ever. He's still laughing, still on top, but you sometimes get the feeling he's hanging on by a dangerously fraying thread. All human life is here, and Blur sound like they're living it while we listen. The result is an album which, even in the wake of a run of exceptional albums by British bands, sets a new standard for British guitar pop in the '90s. If Noel Oasis' strength derives from an ambition to be the John Lennon of his generation, then Blur want to be Lennon and McCartney. Which means 'The Great Escape' is so rammed with tunes, ideas, emotions, humour, tragedy, farce, and edgy beauty that it's utterly beyond contemporary compare.