we celebrate that Blur They have a new single, they are about to release a new album and they will be in Barcelona on June 1 and in Arganda del Rey (Madrid) on June 8, as part of the Primavera Soundwith this review of his best albums ordered from worst to best.
Leisure (Food, 1991)
it cannot be said that Blur be indebted to a lavish debut. Here you could still see the seams of the Manchester sound, and that they came from London. And not even when fashion was at its height of cooking. The obsessed melodies, the brittle rhythms, the lysergy floating in the environment. But very wrong, when that was already headed down the slope. Is it a bad drive? Neither. It has some good songs and some others that are average. What is evident is that, listening to it then, no one could predict what they would become later.
The Great Escape (Food/Virgin, 1995)
The only disc of Blur which sounds practically like a copy of the previous one. Although worse. the shadow of “Parklife” (1994) weighed too much. Something similar to what happened to her happened to her. “Boss Nova” (1990) by Pixies, in “displacement unit“(2000) from The Planets or to “Wish” (1992) from The Cure. They were good. At times, very good. Ok, surely the Blur one not so much. But his great original sin was arriving later. And not straying far enough from the masterpiece that came before them. Even so, what then sounded like (relative) disappointment can now be heard with more benevolent ears, through songs as successful as “Charmless Man”, “Stereotypes” or “It Could Be You”, and one of their best singles, “ The Universal”.
Think Tank (Parlophone, 2003)
Maybe it’s the disc less Blur of all. The only one without Graham Coxon. The most tumultuous and diverse, with dub, jazz, gospel, electronics and African music concurring as nutrients. Recorded with three producers (Ben Hillier, William Orbit, Norman Cook), created in Morocco, against the backdrop of the invasion of Iraq and the shadow of Gorillaz looming. The most complicated to label or link to any specific style or any creative phase of the group. And despite this, or precisely because of this, he has something that others do not have. The crawling spell of “Out of Time”, “Good Song”, “On the Way to the Club”, “Sweet Song” or “Jets” is unique in the discography of Bluralthough the overall balance of his 57 minutes is irregular.
13 (Food/Parlophone, 1999)
The distance between Damon Albarn’s eagerness to experiment and Graham Coxon’s more punk rock orientation is resolved here in favor of the former. For the first time they chose a producer (very) different from Stephen Street: William Orbit. It is another album with ups and downs, but full of interesting deviations from the script, this time indebted to gospel (“Tender”, “No Distance Left To Run”), to rock as rough as barbed wire (“Bugman” or “Trailerpark” , with that dragged rhythm like instrumental hip hop, close to The Folk Implosion) or even swampy blues, like in a “Swamp Song”. Other cuts, like “Coffe & TV,” were more attributable to its canon. Were they playing Primal Scream? Maybe Damon was just trying to wade through his biggest group crisis and his breakup with Justine Frischmann.
The Magic Whip (Parlophone/Warner, 2015)
The best that can be said about it is that, as far from the extemporaneous whim as it is from the nostalgic wink, it doesn’t sound like the type of album that would have been billed just after “Think Tank” (2003). Because although the protagonists are the same from their glory days (even Stephen Street repeats the production), it draws on all the experience accumulated on its own in the previous decade. In fact, it was Graham Coxon (whom Damon had asked out in 2002) who fueled the collection of jams and improvisations that spawned his songs on tour, stuck in a Hong Kong hotel for five days after a concert was cancelled. festival. Uprooting, the troubles of middle age, the contradictions of modernity and the dictatorship of technological progress come together in the middle of a landscape that borders on dystopia. A feeling of helpless space travel, as orphaned as Bowie’s Major Tom.
Blur (Food/EMI, 1997)
Many found it difficult to digest at the first bite. Including his record label. The conversion was too drastic. But they had to deny themselves. The best Pixies song ever signed by them (“Song #2”) helped its way: their cry was the one from the summer of ’97. But they decided to practically become a different band. They suppressed the clear lines and made their music more blurred, rougher, dirtier, more frayed: the album’s title suggests re-founding, but also reclaiming its literal meaning in the Cambridge dictionary. The diffuse image of a patient entering a hospital on a stretcher through the emergency door on his cover is accurate. It is the turn that marks the course of Blur until its hibernation in 2003. And if only for that, a key maneuver on its journey.
Modern Life Is Rubbish (Food/EMI, 1993)
Disk undervalued. His great escape, but the real one: the one with which they broke away from the Madchesterian corset to outline their subsequent greatness. The first step to become contemporary classics. It happens that those who were on the cover of the weeklies in 1993 were Suede. That the previous tour of Blur for the US it had been a disaster and that generated an aversion to everything North American (who would say a few years later). That all God disowned the Manchester sound and almost no one attended to this turn. That not even the first recording sessions, together with Andy Partridge (XTC), had been fruitful. And that whoever had torpedoed them, David Balfe, of Food Records, already envisioned the possibility of getting rid of them. The purchase by EMI and the success of the older brother of this record, “Parklife” (1994), prevented it.
Parklife (Food/EMI, 1994)
Even its most bitter detractors will have to concede that this record is a masterpiece. The best travel companion for anyone who wants to find out if anything great can be learned from all that is called brit pop. The great leap forward Blur He explained a time and a place. A celebration of the past and a moment of euphoria for the present. A formidable retro-futurist sampler of the best British pop of the three preceding decades, condensed into just under an hour. It’s no surprise that several of his songs are still standard in indie club sessions. Or that his cover was made into a stamp by the Royal Mail. He doesn’t have a minute to spare. And no one saw it coming. Except themselves. They embraced disco music like never before, their homage to the customs of Ray Davies, their punk pop vein, psychedelia, synth pop and the melodic song of the sixties in an inexhaustible album.