release date: Apr. 27, 2015
format: cd
[album rate: 3 / 5] [3,22]
producer: Stephen Street, Graham Coxon, Damon Albarn
label: Parlophone - nationality: England, UK
Track highlights: 1. "Lonesome Street" - 4. "Ice Cream Man" - 5. "Thought I Was a Spaceman" - 6. "I Broadcast" (live on later) - 10. "Pyongyang"
8th and so far final studio album by Blur released 12 years after the predecessor Think Tank (2003) also marks a return to Stephen Street in the producer chair as well as a reunion of the original quartet.
Stylistically, the album doesn't stick out in pure experimentation, as it might have done had it been an entirely Albarn-led project. This time Graham Coxon and producer Street have held the style on a leash, which makes it a more cohenrent release than the band's last two studio albums: 13 (1999) and Think Tank (2003). It contains dub, jazz and electronic bits, which builds on the same material as Albarn's 2014 album Everyday Robots, but on an overall level it feels more in family with the artsy britpop Blur came to represent after Parklife.
The album is the sixth consecutive Blur album to enter the albums chart list in Britain as number #1, and in general, the album was met by quite positive reviews. I just don't find it that great. Perhaps time will tell if it's in fact one of their better, but so far I'm not truly convinced. I think of it, as more than just a solid release and far from a lesser album, which has fine moments, but where Albarn and Coxon agreed on getting everything back together by having Street producing again - "just like he used to. We gotta have that!" - in order to make ends meet again, and by that they have made a brand new album using all their brilliant contemporary and accumulated skills and put down a record that fits ever so nicely... somewhere in the past.
[ allmusic.com, Q Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Guardian 4 / 5 stars ]
