Artist bio

See also: Gorillaz, Graham Coxon

In England and Japan, Blur was a paragon of '90s pop music, one of the "big three" (alongside Oasis and Suede) that launched the new wave of Britpop in the early part of that decade. In America, they're largely known as a one-hit wonder for the written-in-two-minutes Pixies ripoff "Song 2". Natch.

The group's four-pronged musical attack was Beatlesque in makeup as well as in sonic temperament: drummer Dave Rowntree, the eldest of the group, was an accomplished drummer who came of age in assorted punk bands; bassist Alex James was a dreamer with a sharply honed predilection for making candy pop. Guitarist Graham Coxon was the group's heart, a technically dextrous musician with an ear for dissonance and an ability to rein in the bombast favoured by singer/songwriter Damon Albarn, the cheeky frontman able to churn out classic pop melodies and fit his malleable voice into a number of widely varying outfits.

Blur matured over its first two albums into a respectable britpop outfit informed by early Who, the Kinks, the Beatles, etc. but really exploded with third effort Parklife, which boiled down the British character sketches and modern life ruminations into a heady brew that topped the U.K. charts for quite a while.

Two albums later, Coxon's infatuation with American indie rock like Sonic Youth and Pavement won the day, as the group's fifth, self-titled album took a more underground bent. The direction was a neccessary one, and kept Blur relevant into the latter half of the '90s. Follow-up 13 was even more 'out-there', a swampy melange on which you can almost hear the group members pulling the sound in different directions.

With Coxon getting the boot in 2002 (just as his solo career was blossoming), who knows where Blur will head next, but the group has made a significant imprint on the pop canon, including about a handful of all-time classic tunes. Which will of course, differ depending on who you talk to.

Albums by this artist

Think Tank (2004)

'Music Is My Radar' (2001)

13 (1999)

Blur (1997)

The Great Escape (1995)

Parklife (1994)

Modern Life Is Rubbish (Recommended) (1993)

Leisure (1991)

Concerts

March 16, 2003
Bowery Ballroom, New York

Blur

13

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» TROY CARPENTER | CO-DIRECTOR

Blur 13 Virgin, 1999 RiYL: Sonic Youth, Spiritualized, Pavement

Blur's sixth album 13 propels the former Princes of Britpop further down the path of lo-fi grunge wizardry first travelled on 1997's Blur. That record just sounded weird coming from Blur. On 13, the band is different on its own terms, and it's a good thing.

Originally, Blur was a bit of a shock. It was a knuckleball heaved at the masses of English fans who rallied around the band's classic -- and mega-successful -- "English Life" Trilogy (Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife, and The Great Escape). Also, the surprise smash American success of the album's "Song 2" threatened to label the band as one-hit wonders to an audience who hadn't been around for most of their decade-long career.

But 13 is evidence that Blur's agenda is not to "do a Pavement" for the sake of hitting it big in the States. One must keep in mind that though the band has been topping the pop charts for years, they have certainly not been creating conformist or derivative music. Despite America's wont to lump them with Oasis, Blur has consistently produced intelligent, technically dextrous albums. And though they've shifted musical mediums, the band's competence level keeps rising.

One aspect lacking from 13 is the slick cohesiveness of past records. The album captures a band thrown into a creative wormhole -- having escaped a great deal of expectations, but not quite sure where they'll go next -- and at first listen the record seems a disjointed musical stew for which the cooks just threw in anything they fancied. Flow is almost non-existent, with snippets of music or jams tacked on to the ends of the diverse tracks serving inconsistently as thematic segues.

But when the songs begin to settle in your brain and the subtleties of taste rise to the top, you can see the band put as much thought and effort, if not more, into 13 than they did for the more accessible entrees of yesteryear. The recording sessions (with an excited William Orbit taking Stephen Street's usual chair as producer) were more free of form, and the band seems to have spent less energy on the preconception of the record than the actual playing and constructing of the songs.

While opener "Tender" is classic Blur, "Bugma" soon gets about as far away from "The Universal" (The Great Escape's pretentious orchestral hit) as possible. This stuff is psycho-glam, almost as if Sonic Youth were backing David Bowie for "Suffragette City." The talent of guitarist Graham Coxon is one of the band's strongest points, and here they let the wonder boy just go a bit crazy with the fuzz boxes. The freakout end-section is one of the most affecting bits of guitar wackiness in recent ememory, endearing even as it hurts your ears. Most likely this is because listeners tend to trust a band like Blur to pull us out of sonic thunderstorms unscathed.

Coxon takes our hand again for "Coffee And TV," which recalls the pop ideals of the Life Trilogy, but updates them for Blur's new maturity level and sonic texture. The shared lead vocal of frontman Damon Albarn and Coxon is a great and rare collaboration in the vein of R.E.M.'s "Superman".

A revival from the vaults, "1992" was originally written for Modern Life Is Rubbish in that year. Blur has certainly turned in a better finished version here than they were capable of back then. The somber, minor-key track has a standout guitar solo which is bettered only by the piano-bass-swirling phased keyboard noise interplay of the second jam section. Albarn starts crowing like a bird at this point, and throwing in the odd "let me out!" in a high-pitched voice.

The lushly contoured soundscapes of "Battle," "Trailerpark" and "Caramel" will take a while to sink themselves into even the most attentive listener's psyche. The latter song traverses reserved areas of introspection, a rolling section of high-pitched vocal cries, and a great unrelated riff in the coda.

"Trimm Trabb," with due congrats on one of the best song titles in recent memory, is fueled by acoustic guitar strumming (at least for the first three minutes) wonderfully complemented by piano, distorted voices, drum samples, and all sorts of fun noises that form an undulating platform for the main riffs. Then it all gets pumped up a notch when Coxon picks up his electric after a middle-eight breakdown.

After all this, the sparse "No Distance Left To Run" brings everyone down from sound-effects land. The song is a wrenching sentimental piece, and it's refreshing to see Albarn take a personal approach to a love ballad (albeit one about lost love). Coxon's lonely, stark guitar line grips the listener firmly, accentuates the lyrical sentiment, and shows Blur still intact, making the best of the raw emotions surfacing at the end of a draining record.

With patience, 13 reveals itself as sort of a poor man's OK Computer, only instead of Radiohead's airborne sonic journey through the future, Blur investigates the murk of its inner-city swamps. The record has enough sonic depth to keep listeners discovering its nuances for a good 20 spins or more. The real upside to all of this is that Blur seems to have created this record relying mostly on instinct. It bodes for a future bright in creative inclination, if not in sonic temperament. Woo-hoo!

TROY CARPENTER | Troy Carpenter founded NATN from a Chicago apartment during the ambitious winter of 1998 with co-conspirators Ben French and Jonathan Cohen. After a five-year stint in New York, he and wife Lourdes have recently relocated to Indianapolis, where he spends days listening to music and nights in the kitchen at Elements restaurant. Musical heroes: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Super Furry Animals. What else makes life worth living: Sushi, Phucty, runs in the park, and the Atlanta Braves.