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Blur - Blur
Reviewed
by Q,
March 1997
Blur:
keeping it simple
 Will all teenage
girls please vacate the building in an orderly fashion.
You've had your fun. You've had your piece of ass. Take
it home, press it, keep it, date it, and move on. The
sexy little indie band want the screaming in their ears
to stop. They want to move on too.
Rather like the Labour Party - and
comparisons will be made - Blur spent 1996 deliberately
remodelling themselves for that all-important 1997, and
the completed manifesto is this, their fifth album
(witness its back-to-Year-Zero title). However, unlike
near-namesake Blair, New Blur are anything but a more
palatable puree of their former selves. Indeed, the
opposite is true. Blur, the album, is far more than the
latest collection of songs signed and sealed by the
prolific Albarn & Coxon and delivered by longtime
producer-confidant Stephen Street; it's a statement of
intent. (Where once the band supplied handy chord shapes
in their CD booklets, this time they don't even print the
lyrics.)
To some - the more flighty among Blur's
post-Parklife subscribers - it will be a surprise, and
not necessarily a pleasant one; to fans who've been there
since 1990, it will sound a lot like a progressive
regression, a necessary retreat. Simply, it takes the
abiding punk guitar instinct of Graham Coxon and the
all-round artfulness that has always driven the band, and
plays them upfront, leaving the music hall comedians and
The Kinks and the commuters and the trumpeters and Phil
Daniels on the bench. In this Stalinist rewrite of
history, it's like Country House never happened.
Oasis are innocent. They didn't bring Blur
to the point of collapse, nor did those who sought to
inflate release-date coincidence into 1995's
media-friendly feud. But by the end of the year in which
Blur's fourth album debuted, justly, at Number 1, but was
then dramatically "overtaken" by Oasis's second
(significantly so, abroad), the four friends who'd been
having hits for half a decade began to feel their
professional age.
Having wooed a new, younger audience - who
duly packed out arenas in their honour - and skilfully
retained the older fans - who also turned up, and
couldn't believe the shrill noise - Blur might've easily
packed it all in. Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993), Parklife
(1994) and The Great Escape formed a spotless English
triptych; they'd stuck together (with each other, with
their record company, with a heart-warming percentage of
their partners) through 1992's commercially lean period,
through 1993's distinct change of direction and
hair-length, and through the ugly graduation to tabloid
currency; it looked like Blur had made it - but to the
end.
So they re-grouped. Went to Iceland to
record. Nailed down what they were really into. As far
back as 1994, Coxon, the most displeased of the four Blur
boys during their box office boom, had talked of
"unlearning the guitar" (a would-be pretentious
project, had Stephen Street not once described him as
"the best guitarist I've worked with since Johnny
Marr"). This process of retrogression was informed
by exposure to much hardcore US punk. And this American
influence drives the new album. Ironically so, after the
calculated Britishness of yore, Blur have more in common
with Sonic Youth and Sebadoh than The Small Faces.
Talk to Albarn
today, and, following the obligatory nod to Beck, he will
promote the new Pavement album as if paid to do so.
Having become the very epitome of English pop Blur have
lost interest in the medium, and looked across the
"pond" for clues, where their noise has long
been too parochial for the natives.
There is a line in, paradoxically, the most
Blur-like track on Blur, Look Inside America, that
distils the band's current thinking: "Look inside
America/ She's alright." They may not be wearing
lumber-shirts and propeller "beenies" in the
photos, and they may not be singing about heroin and
storm doors just yet, but Blur have certainly allowed
cable into their houses before embarking on this
rejuvenated global assault. Unsurprisingly, it's better
than alright.
That said, the album's opener and reasonably
"safe" first single, Beetlebum, isn't
going to blow any socks off. It's just like The Auteurs,
actually, with Coxon's primitivism already showing
through, and a slight drone undulating in the foreground;
its sweet, elongated coda busied by what sounds like an
invasion of turkeys. Result: a slightly menacing Free As
A Bird. Some teenage girls are still loitering near the
exits.
Song Two is where the going gets
tough. A clipped two minutes, it's fuzzy, it's DIY, it
goes "Whoo-hoo!", and the guitar grumbles,
straight out of The Fall circa This Nation's Saving
Grace. It is as addictive and heady as any Charmless
Man or Sunday Sunday, if considerably less
likely to chart.
The seated intro to Country Sad Ballad Man
is a rustic mess from which arises a simply beautiful,
lazy riff. Albarn's voice, up close and personal,
falsetto for alternate lines, and woozy keyboard notes
tumbleweed past. US-alternative obscurists may hear the
San Francisco band Swell. Meanwhile, David Bowie's
lawyers will be concentrating harder on M.O.R.,
which is, in a good and bad way, Boys Keep Swinging.
Moving swiftly on (like, Blur can really spare royalties
at this point), On Your Own pipes aboard the
droney synths. There's a terrace singalong in here
somewhere, undermined by its indistinct drum sound. The
philosophical conclusion, "and we'll all be the same
in the end", makes it Blur's own You Can't Always
Get What You Want. It ends with a siren, of course. Theme
From Retro presents Blur in dub. The voice is spread
all over it like paint, the bass stalks, the cheesy organ
dances, and the remainder is untreated noise;
interference, feedback, sustain, afterburn. It's an
unyielding, lovely row. Like, say, a Blur B-side.
To call this Coxon's album would be unfair
on the recuperated Albarn, but You're So Great is
Graham's Song, and the most American of all. No
percussion, roughly three guitars; his voice - faraway
badly recorded, wavering but heartfelt - belongs to
anyone but Old Blur And if it sounds like it was played
back on an old wind-up gramophone, that, we may assume,
was the very idea. Fade Away on The Great Escape,
was Blur's first stab at "doing a Ghost Town".
On this, the downtempo Death Of A Party becomes
their second. "Why did we bother?/ Should've stayed
away" sounds as if it might refer to Blur's recent
withdrawal from the limelight, but doesn't, since the
track was actually demoed some years back. It's a
genuinely creepy piece, especially when Albarn becomes a
distant, wordless wail.
Chinese Bombs (one minute, 24
seconds) was one of two new songs debuted at Blur's
one-off Dublin appearance last year. We've heard
unreconstituted punk from them many times before
(Jubilee, Bank Holiday Popscene, even Globe Alone); this
actually employs late-'70s shoestring recording
techniques for authenticity. Next to the Beastie
Boys-influenced I'm Just A Killer For Your Love,
it's spunky filler. Killer was the last addition
to the album, recorded in two and a half hours in
Albarn's tiny West London studio space. With yet another
blurred vocal, its nasty titular mantra repeats like
athreat. Blur have led us down a hell of a dark alley by
now. And then ... Look Inside America! Hooray! It's Blur!
It's End Of A Century! Lower the mirror balI! Only the
guardedly pro-US lyric betrays it as New Blur, dropping
cool references to KROQ and in-stores and "a cheque
from the company says it'll be alright". Although
welcome for its sheer warmth and familiarity, it
unnecessarily sugars an otherwise tart and bracing pill.
Strange News From Another Star is
Blur's Space Oddity - acoustic guitar. quiet intro, nutty
mood-change into a darker passage - a melancholy report
whose central thrust ("I don't believe in me")
expresses further doubt from the troubled Albarn. His
pre-Christmas complaint to the music press of a
"mild depression" will have won him as many
friends as David Stewart's Paradise Syndrome whinge, but
at least the music's good.
And Essex Dogs is the best music of
all. Performed as a poem at the Albert Hall in July 1996,
here it's set to a starter-motor riff so berserk even its
author, Coxon, confesses to find it hard to listen to.
Blur's quiet star, drummer Dave Rowntree, somehow picks
it up and hole-punches a smoky rhythm; a gloriously
avantgarde underfelt for Albarn's apocalyptic
farewell-to-Colchester ("I remember the sunsets on
the plains of cement, and the way the night just seemed
to turn the colour of orangeade"). Over "the
smell of puke and piss" runs an insistent Black
& Decker whine, and the combination of Alex James's
slinky bass and Coxon's insectoid guitar actually echoes
Mask by Bauhaus, knowingly or not. It is a fitting ending
(all eight exploratory minutes of it) to a challenging,
barbed masterwork.
An album that sounds like it was made from
hidden extra tracks doesn't really require one, but gets
one anyway, a distressed instrumental sign-oft that goes
nowhere. Unlike the men who made it, who have pulled off
a remarkable, courageous hairpin of an LP here that will
silence their fans rather than their critics (who,
frankly ought to love it). It might even land a couple of
approbatory stars in Rolling Stone magazine, which would
please Damon Albarn no end.
It's as much a triumph for Stephen Street as
for Blur, who has successfully "unlearned" his
own production acumen without once resorting to Steve
Albini's sit-back-and-insult-everyone technique. Blur,
the album, does not have the required four hit singles on
it - unless the world is a cleverer place than it looks -
and it's alright. Blur, the band, have no need to split,
or, more importantly, to worry ever again about what
"the other lot" are up to.
They are now, on the strength of Blur's
truly difficult fifth album, officially on different
planets.
(4/5)
Andrew Collins
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