Blur - Think Tank

[SteveP]

Anyone heard it yet? If so, what's the verdict?

[Colin Zeal EFM]

Mine's on order - £8.49 from Amazon.

 

Here is what MOJO had to say...

 

 

They lost their guitarist and found the world: welcome, Blur’s seventh album.

 

It’s now a staggering eight tears on from their tabloid-led teacup spat over who was going to be number one for a week in 1995. And Noel Gallagher still hates Damon Albarn. The Beatles have died, nations have disappeared from the map, and Blur and Oasis are both now unrecognisable from the groups behind the Country House/Roll With It face-off, yet still it seems that salient differences remain. Because his old rival was involved in protesting against the war in Iraq, Oasis’ songwriter called him a “knobhead”. Which makes a bit of a difference to what Albarn had to say when the other Gallagher called his Gorillaz side project, “music for three year-olds”. “We live in ver trying times,” pondered the man with the receding hairline who was busy putting together the Mali Music worldbeat set. “I think there should be an emphasis on understanding and multi-racial communication and transfer of ideas and emotion.” What a puff, frowned the Gallaghers, as they went down to the Levi’s shop to buy some more denim coats.

 

Of course, Blur have had to navigate trickier situations than this of late. Founder member Graham Coxon, the integral guitar quarter without whom a Blur record would have once been utterly unthinkable, departed last year with some rancour after an eventful 2002 of rehab and just two abortive recording sessions for Think Tank. For groups as totemic as The Smiths and The Stone Roses, this was their terminal event. Blur’s last album, 1999’s 13, meanwhile, was a hard record to love, given extra awkwardness by half-hearted promotion, a general aversion to melody and ungainly stylistic back-pedalling (the band vowed to release the harsh Trimm Trabb as a single, and then opted for the comparatively tuneful Coffee And TV instead). The singular world situation has also lent the new Blur’s first releases an unexpected controversy. When Albarn waggishly told Radio 1 last year that a box of the white label teaser 7-inch, Don’t Bomb If You Are The Bomb, was blown up by the Sussex bomb squad after being left on a train in Brighton, he couldn’t have known just how terribly topical it would all seem a year on. Similarly, the American media have reacted frostily to the video for lead single, Out Of Time, which shows a female soldier serving on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf.

 

These forces of reaction weren’t the only factors that wouldn’t have minded if Blur never recorded again. Commencing in 2000, Albarn’s cartoon hip hop concept Gorillaz went and got bigger globally than Blur themselves, leading to internal tensions and quips by the ever-ambitious Albarn about how he’s now in competition with himself. That year also saw the release of the group’s greatest hits collection, rarely the sign of a group in rigorous health. There were reports that they were working on a song called Elton John’s [****!!****]. On balance, it’s mildly surprising we have a new Blur album at all.

 

And it is a Blur album, but not one the increasingly frayed and sonically outré Coxon could really have played on. From the off, this is intelligent, tuneful, surprising, and able to rock out and caress with equal efficacy. While the choice to use William Orbit again may not have provoked rejoicing from those who favour Blur’s melodic side, and employing big daft Norman Cook just seemed perverse, neither producer significantly stamps the group’s identity. Similarly, recording parts of it in Marrakech gave rise to the prospect of Blur’s world music album; aside from some African stringed instruments, a good deal of field-recorded background noise, greater rhythmic variety and the odd chord progression, this doesn’t happen either. There is, however, an exhilarating sense of new beginnings and musical potential.

 

Blame Can’s Holger Czukay, who told Albarn that until the age of 30, musicians are merely learning, and that the real work begins thereafter. “I ain’t got nothing to be scared of,” assures the introductory track, Ambulance, which opens up from a chirruping conversation between old machines to a more propulsive, powerful groove. In many ways, these lines appear to be true: here is a synthesis of beats and beauty, with a band playing looser and more in harmony with themselves than ever before. This is not, lest we forget, a solo Albarn record. Dave Rowntree’s oddly ego-less beats and Alex James’ bass lines (there’s not a lot of guitars, and what there are are played by Albarn) never fail to move.

 

Songs can be divided into several distinct categories. The pop element is expectedly strong, with Norman Cook’s funked-up Gene By Gene sounding like a creaky gate with Albarn doing a kind of slack-jawed Joe Strummer impression. His other credit, Crazy Beat, is this album’s seismic Song 2. A good deal of ritualistic head music is present too; Jets is a riding, subterranean behemoth with a Middle-eastern sax freak out, and when On The Way To The Club starts to chime and soar, it’s like someone’s reactivated Screamadelica. What most thoroughly connects Think Tank with old Blur, though, is the quality of its balladry. Closer Battery In Your Leg is a farewell as heart wrenching as The Universal or This Is A Low, with Coxon’s sole appearance notable for the great, tragic clouds of black he sparks from his guitar. It both re-emphasises what’s been lost and shows how open-ended the future could be; similarly, Sweet Song is like some moonlit, nostalgic truce declared with the world. Now, like Czukay said they would, they can get on with the real work. You could make a late point that the lyrics tend to the vague and are unequal to the thrilling sounds. Happy Mondays-like Brothers And Sisters’ analysis of recreational drug use and the global military machine, for example, was always going to be slightly hammy (“We’re all drug takers… white doves for the war machine”), while a cynic might argue that Out Of Time’s Hallmark greeting card-style lines, “You’ve been so busy lately you haven’t found the time to open up your mind,” don’t bear that much more scrutiny than the well-intentioned anti-war protester whose solution to global Armageddon was a cardboard sign with ‘love’ written on it.

 

Ultimately, though, these are minor reservations. Invigorating and intriguing, as hummable as it is inventive, Think Tank really justifies Alex James’ claims that it is “next level [censored]”. As immediate as Massive Attack’s 100 Windows was opaque, it’s also very possibly the best thing Blur have done. If Albarn can keep himself away from the side projects, this band will build themselves a canon worthy of a truly great band rather than a really good one. And even if he doesn’t, odds are that no one in Blur will worry themselves too much about what clever Noel Gallagher thinks, says or does. As Think Tank clearly demonstrates – frequently quite majesterially – the only real option is to move on, and keep it moving.

 

 

 

I'm still to be convinced that losing Graham Coxon won't prove costly.

 

 

[Colin Zeal EFM]

Listening to it for the third time now, as I write, and it's all clicking into place.

 

A very, very good album.