Amazon.co.uk Review
Having found himself at a creative cul-de-sac with 1995's
The Great Escape, Damon Albarn bought a flat in Iceland and set about re-evaluating his role in Blur. What emerged was a more soulful, democratised sound. Gone were the Kinks-influenced vignettes about life in suburban England, to be replaced by a more cathartic approach. Grunge influences, for so long off-limits, were now detectable in the loose, angularity of tracks like "Country Sad Ballad Man" and "Song 2". Sensing that this might just be his moment, Blur's resident hard-core fan Graham Coxon is the driving momentum behind much of the band's fifth album. And yet, accidentally or not, some sense of Englishness lingers--be it the
Specials' "Ghost Town" on "Theme from Retro", early
David Bowie on the desolate "Strange News from Another Star" or the
Beatles on "Beetlebum". Ambitious it might have been, but the sheer quality of these songs made
Blur their biggest seller to date. This truly is the great escape. --
Peter Paphides
CD Description
It's okay, America, you can come out now! We don't sound like Duran Duran anymore! Me and the rest of the lads had us ameeting and decided it was time to give the eighties thing a bit of a rest. Don't worry, we didn't throw away all our fab analogue synth gear, we just updated things a little. We moved out of that expensive umpteen-track studio and into our mate's mum's garage to get just the right feel for this one. We were so busy reinventing our sound that we didn't evenhave time to come up with a proper name for the album. What's in a name, though, as long as we've still got the pop hooks coming out our ears? We've been listening to some of thatlo-fi Yank stuff and hanging out with some of the blokes from Stereolab in between reading all those fan mags that makeup imaginary battles between us and Oasis, who care more about being the Beatles than we ever did. So the stage is set for our big American takeover. Now all we've got to do is get that bugger at the record company to stop calling our singer "dude".
