Think Tank

We’ve had a good twelve years of Damon, Graham, Alex and Dave, the beloved indie pin ups of choice until Oasis usurped them as Cool Brittania’s favourite band. In late 2002, the world’s most famous Essex boys split and are since scarred with the departure of maverick guitar genius Graham Coxon. Regardless of your opinion on Blur, Coxon was unquestionably the most inventive and technically accomplished British guitarist since Johnny Marr. Fact.

Graham was always the slightly awkward one. He was painfully shy and usually wasn’t to be found networking in the Groucho, Met Bar or No. 10 with Keith Allen, Damien Hirst or Tony Blair (Remember when Blair was cool? Oh, how the times they are a changin’!). While the others banged on about emulating The Beatles and The Kinks, Graham professed his undying love for Slint and Pavement. He was the Blur member widely accredited for a sharp turn left after the commercial parody of themselves that was The Great Escape in 1996 – the year Britpop rolled up into a tattered fiver, snorted its last line of the good times and officially died.

The release of Think Tank, Blur’s seventh studio album, is overshadowed by war on two fronts; war in Iraq and that recent Coxon war that over spilled its vitriol onto the gossip hungry pages of the tabloids and inkies. Does Think Tank suffer as a consequence? Not to beat around the George W bush, but yes.

While the arrangements, production and execution of ideas are as excellent as you’d expect (former Woodstar producer Ben Hillier take a bow), the songwriting is surprisingly lightweight and indistinctive. By way of a lead single, the boys offer ‘Out Of Time’, a lame pottering about the studio kind of tune that wouldn’t have even made it as a B-side on previous releases.

Having said that, listening to Blur treading water isn’t the worst thing you could do. They haven’t forgotten how to rock, as ‘Crazy Beat’ and ‘We’ve Got A File On You’ noisily illustrate. The latter could easily sit beside their great pop rockers like ‘Bank Holiday’ from Parklife or ‘B.L.U.R.E.M.I.’ from 13. Mind you, it’s no ‘Song 2’. ‘On The Way To Club’ is another great Damon Albarn pot shot at pop culture coupled with some stunning freeform electronic soul. Unfortunately, the rest suffers from a severe case of ‘great title shame about the tune’ syndrome. ‘Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club’ is one of the worst things they’ve ever done, as Damon stakes a claim for the Wigga of Great Britain Award 2003.

While he may have lost his creative foil, Albarn is singing like never before. Coxon is to be heard on many of these dense, well-crafted but unmemorable alt-pop collages. The bizarre and quite frankly awful ‘Battery In Your Leg’ is credited to “Blur/Graham Coxon’. It is the last track and also the final track we are likely to hear Graham weaving his six-string magic on with this band.

Last year, Albarn claimed that this album would make “Radiohead sound like Steps”. Well, I’d rather listen to Steps than this any day. Blur need to go back to the think-tank. Skip this and wait for the ‘Head’s Hail To The Thief instead.