Blur: Classic Or Dud

1. Parklife
2. Modern Life Is Rubbish
3. The Great Escape
4. Blur
5. 13
6. Leisure
...
Think Tank

No, I won't.

Hey Wogan Lenin, name one time Blur did Bugman "already, but better about a million times before"

Thanks.

For kind of obvious reasons, this album pairs nicely (shuffled or played back-to-back) with M's Ray of Light.

Movin On, No Monsters In Me, Come Together, Song 2, Coping, London Loves, Globe Alone, Chinese Bombs...

Actually, I'm listening to it again and it's a bit better than I remembered it. I always filed it under "token Blur-go-noisey" track. BLUREMI is the worst (x) offender though.

Classic of course. My opinion on their albums is that they're all roughly the same quality(except Leisure, which is shit apart from 2 songs). They've never made a perfect 5 star masterpiece, and the fact that they don't seem to be trying for it is a huge part of the appeal to me. It's like they approached every record like it was their White Album.

Here is as good a place as any to post this. Alex on the new album:

I haven't seen any of Blur very much this year. I did run into Damon on
the Portobello Road last month. He was doing wheelies on his BMX. Graham
I bumped into in The Groucho Club the month before, with his new gang. He
has motorbikes now. He used to like skateboards. He didn't turn up to the
studio this week, despite telling the Rabbi he would. Dave, who is an
aeroplane man, I've seen once this year, at Buckingham Palace. Times have
changed. Dave got the Rabbi involved to smooth things out with Graham and
the three of us. Lawyers had tried, but they are the worst people to
resolve arguments. The Rabbi got us all together and found the love in
the room. He was immense. He just wanted us to be friends again. It
nearly happened, but I think this record is going to be just the three of
us. It's a shame. I'd like to show Graham my tractor.

We'd had a couple of jams over the summer in a rehearsal joint called The
Premises on the Hackney Road. We used to go there, all together by bus,
before we had a record deal. There's an agreeable whiff of big-beard jazz
and 'JCB Song' about The Premises. It's oddball muso heaven. The café has
all the clients' press photos on the walls, and no one has drawn funny
beards on them. The menu has gone caffè latte-pain au chocolat since the
80s, and no longer features eggy specials. We used to like those. I think
Dave may have been briefly involved with the eggy-specials lady, but
she's long gone.

The management were keen for us to use their new, big, posh flagship
studio. They said we wouldn't have to pay for it. We wanted to be in one
of the little cells, like before, though. We rocked our socks off and
recorded everything on a cassette through one microphone. 'Cassette' is
practically a swearword these days. Never say 'cassette' to a sound
engineer. They can't handle it. I'm not sure where we're heading with
digital clarity and bit resolution. The nastiness of cheap, loud pop
music is often part of its appeal. Safe to say, the music of the
revolution will not be in 5.1 digital surround sound. In Studio 2, the
leads were noisy, the drum kit was junk, the vocals were going through a
nasty guitar amp, and the bass and guitar were turned up to 10. Producers
aren't comfortable with things on 10. They like eight.

Anyway, it was all wrong, except that when we listened to the tapes last
week, it sounded brilliant. We tried re-recording the first track with
posh mics, preamps and vintage compressors, but it sounded a bit polite
compared with the 50 quid's worth of gear in Hackney. What the hell?
We're going to be working with the Hackney Vibe. It rocks!

I guess we're back in business. The Foo Fighters are going to wet their
pants when they hear this stuff, and they've just built a huge studio.
But everyone's buying old gear now " new's seen as a bit semi-pro. I
think crap equipment could become fashionable next. Thing is, if you've
got a good tune, you can whistle it in the bath and it'll catch on.

I still like the odd track on their albums. For instance, I really liked "Coffee And TV". None of them ones on "Think Tank" stick out in particular, on the other hand, the worst tracks aren't as awful as the worst ones on "13" and even "Blur".

Should have been a single instead of the dreadful "Song 2" I'd rather say. "Look Inside America" is better anyway though (in spite of awful and untrue lyrics)

Why does everybody hate Damon Albarn?

(Besides, aren't there reasons enough posted on this thread?)

-- Mr. Snrub (mistersnru...), September 16th, 2006.
Two words: Mali Music

It can be, I've never heard it, but Albarn's struggling to atone for being the flagship of a movement considered 'racist' in the past is so evident. He's still a good songwriter though, and as I liked 'Demon Days', I would rather like him to use his traditional songwriting skills.

WHEN WILL IT END? I WILL FIST FIGHT EVERYONE IN THIS BAND AND EVERY ONE OF THEIR FANS. HAS THE NEW ALBUM FALLEN THROUGH YET? I WILL FUCKING FIGHT YOU.

I am amazed Leisure has been mentioned only three times. It hasn't aged well but I remember listening to "There's no other way" for the first time and thinking it was amazing and really exciting? I mean, who sounded like Blur whan Leisure came out?
For me it's Blur before Parklife = classic. Dud after that.

"There's No Other Way" will always be a party anthem, and "Sing" will alway be beautiful. But Leisure isn't an album in the way Parklife is an album. It's a foetal, baggy Blur. It's a band who are quite obviously influenced by the Mondays, the Roses and the Charlies. Arguably, every album is informed by some kind of zeitgeist, but then you could counter the argument by saying that Blur were actually riding the wave, not chasing it.

Andi, chill out.

Oh totally, anyone who understands Blur understands that the first album was foetal, embryonic. Even Damon said he was embarrassed by the lyrics on that later on. If you choose that as your fave Blur, you might as well take it and refuse to own the rest of their career.

Which is perfectly fine.

I heard "There's No Other Way" in early '92 and thought, "This is my favorite baggy anthem."

If those two Kaiser Chiefs albums were Blur albums, I would have ranked them as their fourth and fifth best albums, behind "The Great Escape", "Parklife" and "Modern Life Is Rubbish", but ahead of the rest.

13 RULES

"who sounded like Blur whan Leisure came out?"

LOTS OF BRITISH INDIE BANDS IN 1989-91

...like the Sandkings, Cud and even the Charlatans at the time.

THIS IS THE SOUND OF RADIOHEAD BEING BEATEN AT A GAME THEY WEREN'T EV...oh fuck it, i'm drunk

I would say no one sounded quite like Blur in 1991, as Blur were sort of trying out stuff in the middle ground between My Bloody Valentine/Slowdive/Ride/Jesus & Mary Chain on one side and Happy Mondays/Stone Roses/Charlatans on the other one. The best stuff usually leant towards the latter, with snippets of what was to become their mid 90s style thrown into songs like "Bang!" (easily the best song on that album)

Blur didn't sound anything like MBV/Ride etc. in 1991. They might well have liked that stuff and danced around with various people from that 'scene' at Syndrome, but they weren't making that kind of music themselves. They didn't sound anything like the Stone Roses or Happy Mondays either (and those two groups didn't sound anything like each other), but they did fit in to that 'baggy'/Madchester set of groups of that time who were riding in the wake of those two (Inspiral Carpets, The Charlatans, Northside...).

I saw Blur on the Rollercoaster tour in 1992. They were bottom of the bill with Dinosaur Jr, My Bloody Valentine, and Jesus & Mary Chain. At the time, everyone thought 'what the fuck are they doing on this bill?' because they were just seen as an indie-pop group (well, worse than that, an indie-pop group who had had their fifteen minutes of fame a year ago and were going nowhere while the world turned to grunge). The nearest Blur came to that kind of 'shoegazing' sound would be Oily Water on Modern Life Is Rubbish, but they didn't sound like that on Leisure.

I dunno; "She's So High" has touches of shoegaze, perhaps the more 'rocky', trad-psych end (think 'Falling Down' by Chapterhouse, which amusingly enough Blur were later to kinda rip off...10 points for whoever can tell me what with), but the layering of guitars and wordless yodels in the middle-eight is straight out of the shoegazing textebook if you ask me. And that's before I get onto the backwards bit...

Anyway, Blur invented Shoegaze 2.0 with '1992'.

Agree about "She's So High" and also some of the lesser known tracks on the album. Not so much in song structure as in production.

"Popscene" was kind of shoegazing-influenced too. Then, on "Modern Life Is Rubbish" they discovered Kinks and XTC.

"Popscene" was kind of shoegazing-influenced too.

the hell, boy.