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Blur - 13
Reviewed
by NME,
10 March 1999
 Two-and-a-half
minutes into the tenth track on his band's sixth album
Damon Albarn is heard to ponder: "Where is the
magic?/I've got to get better". The song is
'Caramel', where opaque Floydian psychedelia morphs into
distended space-rock with additional call-and-response
operatic chanting.
After six or so impressively edgy minutes,
it drifts to a halt. Someone puts on a record of wobbly
fairground music. A car starts. Finally, this miasmic
trip through a no-longer-so-very-young-man's neuroses
ends with a passable stab at some Death In Vegas-style
chemical funk. What a mess. Yet, in its sprawling,
muddled brilliance, 'Caramel' encapsulates both the very
best and worst aspects of the new album by Blur.
'13' is an extension of the atonement
process instigated by 1997's 'Blur', every aspect of
which, from the title inwards, sought to draw a line
beneath its authors' recent past, in particular the grand
folly that was 'The Great Escape'. If 'Blur' was a wilful
act of rebirth, then '13' is an exercise in enforced
musical adolescence, the sound of men attempting to
unlearn the techniques that defined their premature
maturity. In the process, they've sought to evince the
soul their detractors have always doubted Blur possessed.
Thus, '13' is rampantly indulgent,
transparently emotional - the well-trumpeted, barely
concealed subtext is the demise of Albarn's relationship
with Justine Frischmann - and rather self-consciously
experimental. At 66 minutes' duration, it is (at least) a
quarter-of-an-hour too long. And its vertiginous drops in
quality control means '13' is Blur's most inconsistent
and infuriating statement thus far.
Infuriating, because divested of four
solid-gone clunkers '13' could pass muster as the best of
Blur. Opening with the recent single sets an audacious
tone. If it initially felt crass, a too-obvious
assimilation of Beck's backwoods purity and
Spiritualized's 'Come Together', 'Tender' grows in
stature with every play. Damon has never sung so well,
while Graham Coxon and his dextrous string-manipulation,
rather than the gospel choir, bedrocks the song's
resolution. It really is a marvel. Moreover, in light of
what follows, its devotional flame starts to looks a
little forlorn.
After 'MOR''s 'Boys Keep Swinging' cop on
the last album, 'Bugman' heralds the return of
BlurAsBowie - only this time, there's little semblance of
a tune. 'Swamp Song' is pure frumpery, a lurching
non-song the like of which Pavement might concoct were
they: a) commissioned to compose a Cure pastiche; and b)
completely pissed. Mercifully separating the two is
'Coffee & TV', a sweet, Krautrockin' distillation of
Coxonlife "Sociability/Is hard enough for me/Take me
away from this big bad world and agree to marry me")
that, ironically, given Graham's reputation as Blur's
hitherto frustrated avant-garde conscience, is the LP's
sole straightforward pop song.
The raw, grinding '1992' is the first track
to blatantly address Damon's very public private life,
though only the protagonists themselves will understand
the full implications of such lines as, "You'd love
my bed/You took the other instead", or, "What
do you owe me?/The price of your peace of mind...".
The song's stinging cacophony gradually renders the
specifics inaudible, but the 'message' is plain. Were
'13' really Albarn's pre-mid-life-crisis album, we might
expect such exercises in bruised wisdom to predominate -
and a better record may have emerged. Instead there's the
jokey hokum of 'BLUREMI' and the trip-hop débâcle
'Trailerpark', where in his worst American accent Damon
reveals how he lost his girl "to The Rolling
Stones". Ho-hum.
'Mellow Song' delivers on the half-finished
premise of its half-arsed title. 'Battle' is an artful
studio sprawl searching vainly for somewhere in
particular to go. 'Trimm Trabb', meanwhile, deftly blends
woozy Albarn melancholy ("I sleep alone") with
punchy discordant riffola, yet tarries too long and the
impact is blunted.
Indeed, just as one has been driven near
spare with exasperation at '13''s profligacy, along comes
its saving grace in the bloodily cathartic form of 'No
Distance Left To Run'. Over Graham's sorrowful, twilight
grind, Damon offers his former lover an extended
valedictory: "It's over", he croaks. "You
don't need to tell me/ I hope you're with someone who
makes you feel safe in your sleeping tonight/ I won't
kill myself trying to stay in your life".
Beautifully sung again, this twinside to 'Tender''s
affirmatory hymnal is a blessed piece of music. Even at
the death, though, they have to slip in 'Optigan 1', an
instrumental coda that dilutes the preceding song's
force.
That magic is here, then, but so clogged by
extraneous growth you could be forgiven for not noticing.
'13' is the first album Blur have made without producer
Stephen Street, and while it clearly reveals a band
operating at new levels of creative intensity there's no
question that some hard-but-fair pruning would have
improved its demeanour. Next time, perhaps this newly
organic Blur shall finally triumph and make a genius pop
record that doesn't sound like it's been either
genetically modified or hamstrung by a bogus quest for
authenticity. Come on, come on, come on...
6/10
Keith Cameron
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