Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Their best album (so far!!), 8 Jul 2006
I laugh at all the "top 100 British albums" polls that never even mention Blurs second triumphant comeback album Modern Life Is Rubbish. Its always Parklife or Blur that make it, pretty fine albums but not as complete as Modern Life Is Rubbish. At the time of recording this album Blur were basically hanging on to a record contract by the skin of their teeth, after descending into an alcohol fuelled self-destructive abyss after falling off the baggy bandwagon with a thump. Thankfully they pulled themselves together and went back to their influences, Ray Davies, Paul Weller, Syd Barrett, Morrisey and various other classic English songwriters and started creating this masterpiece.
The thing I like about this album is the feeling it gives you. As soon as you hear the opening chiming chords of For Tomorrow you can't help but feel misty eyed and in love with Englishness Blur paint into their songs. This is the album where Damon is at the top of his game lyric wise and Graham creates some of his most wonderful chord progressions and melodies. Blur may have produced poppier catchier hits after this album but nothing as pretty as this.
My favourite songs on here are 'Blue Jeans', a beautiful song about a pair of jeans bought on Portobello Road, 'Resigned' a slow song with a melancholy feel and 'Coping' a punky tune about... coping with modern life. An excellent album with few bad points (Colin Zeal!), and a couple of other songs that i recommend from this era of Blur are (if you can get hold of them) 'Popscene' and 'Young And Lovely'
|
|
|
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Blur's first great album (and maybe even their best?)., 26 Nov 2006
Reaching my adolescence in the mid-1990's, "Britpop" was obviously going to play a large part in my musical upbringing, with bands like The Auteurs, Pulp, The Divine Comedy and Blur providing the natural soundtrack for five years worth of traumatic secondary school existence, first love, lonesome nights, sexual frustration, and the all-too brief release of the weekend ahead. In hindsight, the era certainly wasn't all it's cracked up to be, with only five or six great bands to make up for a whole heap of derivative fluff. For every Blur and Oasis you had a Menswear or Gene, whilst for every Luke Haines or Jarvis Cocker, you had people like Rick Witter and Steve Cradock (who?). Blur where the band that I gravitated to first; discovering them around the time they released Parklife, but only really becoming hooked with their hugely popular fourth LP, The Great Escape.
Discovering the joys of Modern Life is Rubbish following those albums cemented my fondness for the band, which still continues (to some extent) to this day. Listening to the album again just a few minutes ago, it's amazing how fresh the songs still sound. As a result, it's perhaps a good thing that 'Modern Life...' never achieved the same kind of chart success as later albums like Parklife and The Great Escape, with the songs here still managing to sound new and invigorating; while later tracks, like Girls and Boys, Parklife, Country House and Stereotypes have become somewhat stale (the same can be said about the tracks on Morning Glory or Pulp's Different Class).
This album saw Blur moving away from the Madchester/Shoegazer influences of that flawed debut Leisure, to embrace 60's pop, 80's new-wave and American grunge; creating a nice little parallel to the genre defining debut album by The Auteurs (New Wave, released 1993), which really established the template of acoustic rhythm guitars backed by an electric lead, a competent rhythm section and embellishments of strings, horns and piano. The influences here take in everything from The Beatles, The Kinks, The Bee Gees (early stuff), The Small Faces, XTC, The House of Love, The Smiths, Syd Barrett, Nirvana, The Beach Boys, The United States of America, The Pretty Things, Robyn Hitchcock, Julian Cope and The Sugacubes, though individual listeners will probably find more than that lurking beneath the eclectic sonic veneer. The story goes that the band had originally wanted Andy Partridge of XTC to produce the album - which would have made sense, what with 'Modern Life...' fitting nicely alongside albums like Black Sea and English Settlement - though the record company would eventually go for the more "of-the-moment" Stephen Street (who produced the last few Smiths albums, as well as the first few by Morrissey), which again, makes a certain kind of sense given the style of the music here.
Some of the songs are fast, brash, agitated rockers, whilst others are slower, more down-tempo affairs backed by piano and mild-orchestration. As with most Blur albums, the stylistic diversity could be seen as being indicative of the future solo or collaborative works of the principle band members, with singer Damon Albarn favouring 60's and 70's influences pop, with catchy choruses and danceable hooks, guitarist Graham Coxon going for the more stripped-down stuff that points towards acts like Syd Barrett or the American indie-rock of Pavement and Sonic Youth, and bassist Alex James brining the sense of colour and humour that would be even more up-front in his collaborations with Fat Les and Betty Boo. Dave Rowntree's drums keep the disparate influences together, creating a neat and unique fusion between the harder songs and the softer ones.
The songs here will probably be less familiar than those on the subsequent albums (or even the singles from Leisure, all of which did fairly well), though it goes without saying that the opening track, For Tomorrow, as well as tracks like Advert, Chemical World and Sunday Sunday were all prime standards for those of us who managed to see the band live during the mid-to-late 90's peak. I also think the album holds together better than the more celebrated Parklife, which was perhaps a little over-indulgent, whilst it also doesn't suffer from the over-stuffing of material that The Great Escape had (a lot of bands from this era used the compact disk to it's fullest, packing it with 60 minutes worth of material when 40 would have been enough... see Pulp's This is Hardcore for a prime example).
Modern Life is Rubbish is a fine pop album, filled with a great variety of iconic pop and rock songs and peppered with a clutch of interesting and intelligent musical arrangements. It doesn't suffer from the self-awareness of the more familiar Parklife, or the stale excess of the otherwise great The Great Escape, and instead, offers a wonderful sense of colour, variety and sound. Britpop might have been a vague and obnoxiously London-centric catch-all created by record company execs to lump together a bunch of would-be mods and rockers... but some of those albums still stand up!! Modern Life is Rubbish really stands shoulder to shoulder with fine albums like New Wave, Suede, At the Club, Promenade, Now I'm a Cowboy, Different Class and Six as an example of music that still works regardless of trends and labels. The first great Blur album, and perhaps their best?
|
|
|
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My favourite blur album, 22 Jan 2004
Blur's best of features a great overview of their career. However, any blur fan that knows their salt would have realised that MLIR is almost totally ignored. Which is a shame since in essence blur's second outing is their strongest and most complete album. To my mind one of the best second albums alongside Mansun's 'Six', and Ramones' 'Leave Home'.
What really makes the album is that it can be viewed as having no singles, and much like 13; every single one could have been a single! It's all quality. The singles are very strong though For Tomorrow and Chemical world are excellent examples of Damon's vocal and musical talent coupled with graham's restrained guitar work.
Unlike Parklife, which contains most of blur's transition to pop figures (there's no girls and boys song here), MLIR treads a line between catchy pop and distortion rock.
Of the cuts the best are Blue Jeans, Oily Water, Villa Rosie, Advert, For Tomorrow, Chemical World and Starshaped, but listen to grahams guitar on Commercial Break.
In a sentence, Modern Life Is Rubbish showcases blur flexing their muscles, stepping away from the mainstream of Leisure and embracing their roots and influences. Superb.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
