Q To use the vernacular of our friends in the American therapy industry, today's music business is not a nurturing environment. One might use the expression cut-throat if that didn't seem so insulting to our piratical ancestors. For all except a highly successful-and hence cosseted-few, being in a band is a perilously insecure lifestyle, where each lowly chart position is expected to bring the summons to the boardroom for the little chat. It's been said that if Elton John had begun his career in the '90s, he'd have been dropped around Tumbleweed Connection. Certainly, the notion of a group being allowed to develop and ripen over the course of two or three albums seems a quaintly antediluvian one now. Consequently, bands who are on a continual improvement curve are few. But in Britain we have one. They are Blur and theirs is a gratifying ascent from pretty indie sandboys to a group of real quality, importance and popular significance. With the exception of 30-year-old drummer Dave Rowntree (toothless, wrinkled, failing sight) Blur are in their mid-twenties. Park Life is their third and best album to date and, barring tragedy, points the way to what could be a decade of terrific records. It continues where last year's celebratedly splendid Modern Life Is Rubbish left off in marrying a highly individual stance (ostensibly deadpan but full of bitter-sweet and sardonic observations about modern Britain) to shifting musical styles that represent a form of potted, vaudevillian tribute to British pop. Modern Life Is Rubbish exulted in The Small Faces-style Cockney beery geniality, horribly uncouth punk rock catalepsy and convincingly perfect pop singles. Park Life remains true to this spirit, to an admirable idea of making albums that are kaleidoscopic and ambitious in scope, but it goes even further, to the darkest recesses of the early '80s and to a kind of music that even the most generous commentators would have thought beyond rehabilitation. It's in this vein that the album begins, with the naively ingratiating antique synthesizer that ushers in the recent single Girls And Boys. With its hamstrung white funkiness (largely thanks to Alex James's prominent bass line) and abrasive guitar colourings, Girls And Boys resembles nothing so much as a well-read Duran Duran. Its artificiality stays just the right side of the irritating and it is supremely catchy. The choice of musical setting reflects the song's subject matter: the grim licentiousness and carnality of the Club 18-30 holiday. Refreshingly, though, the tone of the song is morally neutral. Damon Albarn's lyrics often attract comparison to the social caricatures of Ray Davies and Paul Weller but it's hard to imagine even those two luminaries addressing such pastimes (lager, sunbathing, wanting to sleep with strangers) without a sneer or some veneer of assumed superiority. Blur merely revel in the chat-up lines and shallow badinage of Du bist sehr schon ... but we haven't been introduced and get a great few minutes of pop out of it. Of the same edgy, twitching and 1980 vintage is London Loves, whose jerky, robotic rhythms underpin a general sense of disconnectedness that's reminiscent of the Bowie of Lodger and the Eno of Here Come The Warm Jets. As guitarist Graham Coxon launches into a lurid solo-cum-fractured Robert Fripp homage, it's evident how far ahead Blur are of their peers in sheer technical nous. Note, too, their willingness and ability to delve into styles far beyond the generic indie pop they might wrongly be seen as embodying. There is a coy nod, too, towards pop culture's current fixation with matters New Wave in the declaration London loves ... the mystery of a speeding car/London loves the misery of a speeding heart. Later on in the proceedings, Jubilee has a raffish swagger emboldened by gruff, throaty horns that have Hunky Dory written all over their music stands. Though now in danger of becoming a particularly weighty albatross around their collective neck, there's no escaping Blur's unabashed Anglocentrism. America's stylistic sway on their music is negligible, and if it's detectable at all, it's only so through a filter, and indeed a welter, of British influences. Magic America is brusque and funny and sweetly withering about the virtues of unlimited TV, huge portions of food and the mind-set of those who would rather visit Disneyland than Barcelona or Budapest. At the heart of the album, the title track presents itself as a wince-inducing piece of panto but it's actually a smart and funny observation on Blighty delivered by Phil Daniels in the role of an all-purpose minor player in the national life; part barrow boy, part Jack The Lad, part articulate cabbie. The comedic slant is attractive (It's got nothing to do with Vorsprung Durch Technik, you know) but it shouldn't be allowed to detract from a snappy, invigorating pop arrangement that manages that neatest of conceits, nostalgia that is reminiscent of no one specific.