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Blur -
Think Tank
Reviewed
by
SPIN,
May 2003
Britpop
veterans embrace the world
 “I
ain’t got nothing to be scared of,” sings Damon
Albarn on Blur’s seventh album, and means it as both
an opening gambit and a mission statement. Since his
breakup with Justine Frischmann in 1998, Albarn has
discovered hip-hop, monkeyed with Gorillaz, gone native
in Mali, and raged against the war machine.
Unfortunately, America’s response has been a
half-hearted “woo-hoo,” usually between periods
at hockey games.
No matter—the world’s a big place.
After spending act one of their career in archly
Victorian fashion—skewered snooty Englishisms,
exoticizing the dog track, engaging in horseplay behind
the manor—Blur have reinvented themselves as boldly
postcolonial popsters. Think Tank’s songs
aren’t merely multicultural, they’re
multilateral, recorded partly in Morocco and sung in a
musical polyglot Hoovered up from stray corners of the
empire: aspects of Afrobeat, bits of bhangra, images of
Islam. With guitarist Graham Coxon missing in action, the
rhythm section of Alex James and Dave Rowntree steps up,
and the album shuffles and grooves like Fela Kuti sloshed
on gin and tonics. Opener “Ambulance” surprises
with skronking saxes; “Sweet Song” and
“Caravan” ooze and shudder with a world-weary
melancholy.
Back on the home front, Fatboy Slim funks up
“Crazy Beat” (suggested alternate title:
“Song 3”). But the track’s escapist
laddism feels forced and hollow. The far better
“We’ve Got a File on You,” with jackbooted
punk noise interrupting the sound of a Muslim prayer
call, cops to the uglier side of Britpop’s rah-rah
nationalism. The album’s highlight may be the
failure-soaked, heart-stoppingly lovely “Out of
Time,” which perfectly captures the jumble of beauty
and dread the defines life under orange alert. “Are
we out of time?” Albarn asks, desperate for one last
peace march or one last snog. Emboldened by politics,
fatherhood, or some primo Jamaican ganja, Albarn has
learned what the Pentagon has not: The planet is its own
Total Information Awareness Network. As he sings near the
end of the album, “You’ve got a battery in your
leg.” Either plug in or get out of the way.
Grade:
A
Andy
Greenwald
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