|
Blur -
Think Tank
(Album
of the Month)
Reviewed
by
Uncut, June 2003
Magnificent seventh
How
will the onetime Britpop heroes cope with their 'unsung'
guitar genius? Just fine, it seems
 IN MOST CULTURES, seven is a magic number.
Not in rock'n'roll, where to sustain any degree of
originality beyond album three or four is about as rare
as a sober Shane MacGowan. So it is nothing short of
remarkable to report that Think Tank is the
sharpest, most imaginative and downright listenable album
of Blur's career to date - something virtually no other
British band has been able to claim seven albums into the
game since The Beatles (Revolver) and The
Rolling Stones (Beggars Banquet).
Think Tank is also the perfect
riposte to Damon Albarn's detractors, who like to claim
that departed guitarist Graham Coxon was Blur's unsung
genius. Think Thank not only confirms that
Albarn was the band's musical visionary. It also suggests
that, at 35, he's matured into the Bowie of his
generation, with a seemingly endless capacity to absorb
new ideas and come up with something fresh and different
every time.
Albarn's development has taken us by
surprise. Cas your mind back to the mid-'90s. Pulp's
Jarvis Cocker was widely held to be the cleverest of the
Britpop crew, the 'arty one' most likely still to be
making interesting music in 10 years' time. Yet he's
produced nothing to match 1995's Different Class.
It was more predictable that, after Oasis' early
triumphs, Noel Gallagher would be reduced to repeating
himself. But few could ever hasve imagined from the
chirpy mannerisms of Parklife that Albarn would
prove to have such depth. These days, he dismisses Blur's
early material as "a joke" - and, in many ways,
Think Tank is not so much Blur's seventh album
as the third album by Blur Mk II. For after 1995's The
Great Escape, Albarn killed off Britpop with the
band's career-changing fifth album, 1997's Blur,
which owed more to Sonic Youth and Pavement than to The
Kinks and The Small Faces. Two years later, it was
followed by 13, an even more panoramic adventure
in hi-fi, lyrically inspired by the disintegration of his
relationship with Justine Frischmann.
Since then he's scored a film soundtrack
with Michael Nyman, and dreamt up the brilliant conceit
that is Gorillaz, which found him flirting with dance and
hip hop. He also discovered world music, started his own
label, and released his acclaimed African-fusion project,
Mali Music. Now all of this musical voyaging on
the high seas comes home to roost on Think Tank.
 Not that it is either a world music album (a
rumour which started when the band decamped for a month
with a mobile studio to Morocco) or a dance record (a
theory developed by NME, which claimed that
Norman Cook was masterminding the production). Fatboy
Slim does assist on a couple of tracks, and Albarn
insinuates some subtle non-Western rhythmic touches here
and there. But they merely add flavouring to what is a
grown-up alt.rock album of breathtaking potency and
invention.
"I wanted to write some really great
pop tunes and then to make them sound really fucked
up," Albarn told Uncut. It's a perfect
description of Think Tank's mission and its
greatest strenght - namely its juxtaposition of audacious
and unusual textures, in which you can hear the spirit of
Eno, mid-period Bowie and Can, with some of the most
heart-rendingly sweet melodies this side of Burt
Bacharach. This means that, however ambitious the band's
sonic experiments, Albarn's melodic skills ensure Blur
remain as commercially astute as ever.
Lyrically, Albarn claims the album is about
"the personal and the political". In reality,
this means that old-fashioned '60s mantra, "peace
and love". There's plenty of tenderness to reflect
both his new-found happiness as a family man and his own
neo-hippie philosophy. The political content reflects his
role in the anti-war movement, with various references to
the parlous state of the world today. They're oblique
and, at times, even obscure. But if he rewrote
"Masters Of War", we'd all accuse him of
naiveté, wouldn't we?
Musically, Alex James and Dave Rowntree are a highly
accomplished rhythm section. But with Coxon gone, Blur is more than ever
a vehicle for Albarn's pop savvy. The opener, "Ambulance", sets an
unnerving krautrock beat against a hauntingly beautiful vocal. "Out Of
Time" features an Arabic ensemble and Albarn playing some distinctly
non-Western guitar, but also boasts a tune so sweet that Celine Dion
could cover it. "Crazy Beat" bears the unmistakable cartoon signature of
Fatboy Slim. "Good Song" is rough and scratchy but with another sublime
melody and Beach Boys-style harmonies. On "Brothers And Sisters", Ali
Farka Toure meets Tricky with Albarn playing moody African-blues guitar
against a brooding funk-noir beat.
The flickering, cinematic languor of "Caravan" is
dramatically enhanced by a slurred and disembodied vocal. "We've Got A
File On You" (tell that to Alex James, who last month was banned from
entering the US) is 60 seconds of hardcore trash. The zany "Moroccan
People's Revolutionary Bowls Club" is a mad but inspired fusion of
organic roots and techno beats. "Sweet Song" is exactly that, with more
dreamy Brian Wilson moments. "Jets Like Comets" moves from an exotic,
vaguely Arabesque motif to a fantastic bebop coda played by Gorillaz sax
man Mike Smith.
And so it goes on in all its dazzling
diversity. "Gene By Gene" is a piece of
futuristic doo-wop with sound effects - strange but true
- sampled in Morocco by jumping up and down on a rusty
old farm truck used to transport the local olive crop to
the market in Marrakech. The closer, "Battery In
Your Leg", contains the album's only remaining trace
of Coxon, playing a lovely, tremolo-heavy descending
guitar part that could have come straight from one of Joe
Meek's early-'60s productions.
Think Tank took shape over a period
of almost a year. Albarn first played Uncut the
work in progress at his west London studio in June 2002.
By the time the band upped sticks to Morocco in October -
the end of the record-making process - there were 28
tracks ready to go. The overall quality was so high that
many future Blur classics - including "The
Bomb", "Chicken And Fries", "The
Outsider", "I'm The Original" (a kind of
riposte to The Streets) and "Techno Tune" -
haven't even made the final cut.
As a result, Blur have enough material to
'do a Radiohead' and release another album in nine
months' time, the Amnesiac to Think Tank's Kid
A. They should do it. The most intelligent British
pop group of the last 10 years? And then some.
(5/5) Nigel
Williamson
Typed
up by Veikko's Blur Page
|
