Blur's Think Tank

Probably shows how little I listened to it. I dunno I probably should've said it felt regressive in comparison to the weirder place they ended their career on initially.

I'll keep 'Lonesome Street', 'Thought I Was a Spaceman', 'My Terracotta Heart', 'There Are Too Many of Us', 'Pyongyang' and 'Mirrorball'

I'll destroy 'New World Towers' (dull momentum killer), 'Go Out' (terrible choice of single) and 'Ice Cream Man', 'Ghost Ship' and 'Ong Ong' (which all would have worked better as Gorillaz tracks)

imo Go Out is comfortably the best thing on it

'Pyongyang' is the best track for me, because it partly sounds like Japan trying to cover 'Gimme Shelter' ...

'Pyongyang' is probably a top 5 song for me.

I've always been a major defender of Think Tank and one of the reasons I preferred it over 13, was that I felt the 'jammy' side had been reigned in compared to that album. If certain songs were born out of jams then the results to my ears sounded less overtly improvised and it absolutely appears he brought in more realised song ideas than the previous album.

13 is kinda great, but in a selfish way, my problem was that it lost the 'feel' of what I believed a Blur album to be and I completely got that back with Think Tank.

Another flaw I find with 13 and indeed an album like This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours is that they were released in the aftermath of OK Computer being declared Best Album Of All Time by some (though mainly magazine readers with about 50 CDs)

I agree that Think Tank feels more like a song-based record - and more polished - in comparison to 13.

This is gonna sound weird, but I actually really like the guitar playing on Think Tank. Albarn is no Coxon, of course, but his amateurish playing has a certain feel to it that I like.

'On the Way to the Club' still does it for me, particularly when the harmonies kick in at the end of the last chorus and then the outro with the synths and the wordless vocals... superb.

Love Albarn's guitar playing on TT. While it remains something less than a universally loved album today, at the time there seemed to be a lot of people expecting it to be terrible - comparing it to Cut The Crap - and writing it off prior to it's release. It's perhaps easy to forget that for a long time it appeared that Graham was the member everyone loved and Albarn was viewed basically as a prick. It didn't appear to matter that he was by far the chief writer - there was for a long time pro-Graham bias from many casual fans who felt he couldn't put a foot wrong, while Damon was always to blame, for example the assumption that Coxon's exit from the band was necessarily a cruel ousting, rather than something altogether more delicate and complicated.

I remember being absolutely delighted upon actually hearing it and it was reassuring to read mainly good reviews in spite of the anticipated backlash

No, I haven't forgotten what it was like at all and your recollections are pretty OTM and exactly the same as mone.

I remember a lot of people expecting Think Tank to be terrible - at the time there was indeed a widespread assumption that Albarn needed Coxon in order to develop his ideas or keep him "in check" ... Albarn was cast as wanting to play the pop star and Coxon was cast as the guy who wanted to always steer Blur in odder, weirder, more uncommercial directions.

As everyone later found out, Albarn turned out to be the exploratory one, while Coxon mostly fell back on pretty basic, guitar-led indie rock.

*mine

I'm guessing... no, I'm 100% sure that Think Tank's relatively poor performance for a Blur album had a lot to do with a lot of people writing the album off before even listening to it, because they expected it to be - some maybe even wanted it to be, because of the split with Coxon - a lousy record.

I admit that, initially, I thought the album wasn't going to be up to much, but I bought it anyway as I was a fan. It vastly exceeded my expectations - particularly as, at the time, I wasn't a huge fan of the first Gorillaz record despite liking the singles.

I think Think Tank did remarkably well considering how albums by their 90s heyday contemporaries - Pulp, Suede, Manics - fared with the albums released closest to Blur's. There just wasn't a massive amount of enthusiasm for a new Blur album, except from the devotees, so I would say it's relative success was a small victory in the face of everything...

Sadly many describe it somehow as if Crazy Beat and the sax solo in Jets were the entire album.

I seem to remember Know Your Enemy doing quite well. Heathen Chemistry too, bizarrely. But yeah, We Love Life deserved better and Suede were on the slide creatively as well as commercially. Life On Other Planets was a bit of a sales nosedive for Supergrass as well.

I meant Lifeblood specifically as closest to TT's release, which limped to something like number 13 in the charts. Know Your Enemy was still something of a minor event at the time, I guess. Whole lotta floppin' goin' on from 90s acts.

Yeah, Lifeblood definitely performed poorly - I actually thought the Manics were over during that period, particularly when the solo albums appeared, and was very surprised when they bounced back. Even though the records at either side did far better, I prefer Lifeblood to Know Your Enemy and Send Away the Tigers these days. I think it's aged far better.

the first two posts itt are gold

needed a rethink...
bleccchhh.

― Fritz Wollner (Fritz), Wednesday, 16 April 2003 07:02 (fourteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh wait... it's getting better

― Fritz Wollner (Fritz), Wednesday, 16 April 2003 07:06 (fourteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xpost Lifeblood I consider to be quite fantastic despite it being viewed as a dead duck at the time, by the public and later the band themselves. Seems to have become a fan favourite too. Have no idea to listen to Send Away The Tigers ever again.

idea? desire. ability to be arsed. tired.

The Manics are probably the last people anyone should ever listen to for opinions on their own music.

I remember a lot of people expecting Think Tank to be terrible - at the time there was indeed a widespread assumption that Albarn needed Coxon in order to develop his ideas or keep him "in check" ... Albarn was cast as wanting to play the pop star and Coxon was cast as the guy who wanted to always steer Blur in odder, weirder, more uncommercial directions.

As everyone later found out, Albarn turned out to be the exploratory one, while Coxon mostly fell back on pretty basic, guitar-led indie rock.

― The Anti-Climax Blues Band (Turrican), Wednesday, July 26, 2017 11:16 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Shades of how the Lennon/McCartney relationship was perceived. My dad's generation sees Lennon as the 'edgy' guy and McCartney as the soppy poppy dude, whereas mine remembers Lennon as a meat-n-potatoes rock classicist and McCartney as the guy who jammed with AMM and did Temporary Secretary. The reality is that both sides are right.

I'm listening to some of the recommended tracks off The Magic Whip. I felt absolutely nothing about this album when I first came to it. I think the production is kind of thin and shitty compared to their best work (some of Think Tank suffers from this too). But 'Thought I Was A Spaceman' is actually very nice. Not much of a 'song' in the Blur sense and sort of jammy and krautrocky but I'm tempted to tack it onto the Spotify playlist I posted in my revive.

Yeah, the production on The Magic Whip is kinda thin, especially in comparison to the other Street produced albums, and I think a lot of it was down to the way the record was made... I think if it had been made with everyone present and focused from start to finish, it would be a different story.

Also, and this is not to be a slight on the rhythm section or Coxon, but Damon was responsible for writing the lions share of Blur's material.

Blur are a big oomphy band in my mind. Magic Whip has pretty much no oomph to it at all.It sounds like a Damon solo album with added Graham

And even on Think Tank, apart from maybe Out of Time and a couple of others, I couldn't really tell you what the hook or chorus is. I've heard the album a good heap of times since it came out and I'm still not sure how about half the songs go, whereas I'd be able to recall very strongly how all the songs on Parklife go. Not saying that Blur should be so one-dimensional as to only make big pop singalongs (they proved on 'Blur' that they were able to go in other directions), but the missing element certainly makes TT/TMW sound like a different band entirely

I think there's parts of The Magic Whip that sound like Blur, parts of it sounds like Gorillaz, and it occasionally lapses into solo Damon sleepiness ('New World Towers') ... there's nothing on there that's anything like solo Graham. I'll leave solo Alex out of the discussion, because none of that shit is worth taking seriously.

I can recall how all the songs go on all their albums, fwiw.

Some of Coxon's guitar playing is just as unlistenably abrasive as Damon's singing. At this point I think I'd happily take "Clover over Dover" and put the rest of the catalogue aside.

Loved them at the time, though.

The S/T album was pushed a lot as "Graham's album", though I wonder had they chosen to record "Alex's album" instead what such a thing would be like. I'm picturing 'Hanging Around' in place of 'You're So Great' and the lead single being something akin to 'Vindaloo'/'Naughty Xmas (Goblin In The Office)' with a token track for Damon ('Theme From Sunnyside Farm')

Jesus christ, there's a "what if" I don't even wanna contemplate...

...a lot of the myth surrounding Damon being the "pop one" and Graham being the "experimental one" came about because of the change in sound from The Great Escape to Blur, but Damon was still the lead writer on Blur (and 13) and had demoed most of the album prior to the band working on it...

13 is one of my favourite break-up records ever, it's messy, sprawling and conflicted. Think Tank is probably the perfect follow up

I'd like 13 more if it were about 15-20 minutes shorter.

I'd like it if it were approx half as long. it's very much a 50% great / 50% terrible record for me

'Swamp Song' is the one I particularly dislike, and 'Tender' didn't ever need to be that long.

Basically, what happened post-The Great Escape is that Damon began his smack period, which I'm guessing ended after either Think Tank or while making Demon Days ...

Think Tank is a great album except for the ones done with Fatboy Slim

I'm not convinced that Fatboy Slim actually did very much. I can't hear his influence at all on 'Gene by Gene' ...

The secret intro track on Think Tank is godawful, I don't recall my version having that tho

Mine does. There's also a different version of it.

Listened to TT yesterday, still absolutely love it and would place it behind only Parklife and MLIR. However 'Crazy Beat' is so obnoxious I bet it has sullied some people's perception of the entire album and the decision to include that dire sax solo at the end of the otherwise fine 'Jets' can surely only be blamed on some kind of drug consumption. I would welcome a further barrel-scraping box set simply to present a version which edits it out.

don't tell anyone, but i kinda like that sax solo...

Crazy Beat really does make TT into a curate's egg. Such a stinker. Makes me think of the Boo Radleys' 'Kingsize' which I always thought of as a dodgy album but realised that was entirely down to the inclusion of 'Free Huey' which taints the whole thing

got a radio hit in mind

ha it is so the Free Huey of that album

i never minded it, shameless and soulless attempt at a hit single it may be. Free Huey, on the other hand, is one of the least pleasurable songs I've ever heard.

don't tell anyone, but i kinda like that sax solo...

― Frederik B, Friday, July 28, 2017 3:37 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same

'Crazy Beat' is really no better or worse than any other Blur track in the same mould, IMO. Negative opinions on it tend to be OTT - I can think of close to fifty Blur songs that are worse - many of 'em B-sides.

Listening to the album again the other night, I found myself kinda liking 'Jets', although I'm not fond of the sax solo...

don't tell anyone, but i kinda like that sax solo...

― Frederik B, Friday, July 28, 2017 10:37 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Because it reminds you of your favourite porno?

Dude, your weird obsession with me and porno is beginning to be kinda creepy. Fuck off, will you?

xp Albarn is best when he's working with bold, primary-coloured music. When he gets sloppy and impressionistic I lose a lot of interest, and that's something he's become increasingly prone to

Fox Mulder, the new Gorillaz is very bold and primary-coloured though, and it's horrible.

I actually think his writing is able to make for delicate and sophisticated impressionistic songs. It's just that his pervasive persona inevitably spills some quanity of cheese over everything he puts out, and that cheese goes much better with primary-coloured music.