轉錄自
https://guitar.com/review/album/the-genius-of-blur-blur/?amp
THE GENIUS OF… BLUR – BLUR
A ‘mid pop life crisis’ and an abrupt change of style gave Graham Coxon free
reign to soundscape on one of the most enduring and experimental guitar recor
ds of the 90s.
By Owen Bailey - 22nd July 2020
Graham Coxon & Damon Albarn of Blur
Graham Coxon & Damon Albarn of Blur. Image: Mick Hutson / Redferns
Let’s scare people again
With interband tensions on the rise and the fabled ‘musical differences’ thr
eatening to come to a head, Blur responded by tearing up their deep-rooted Ang
lo-centric approach for their self-titled 1997 album. Coxon urged Albarn to ma
ke music to “scare people again”, urging the band to embrace the looser, ‘l
o-fi’ aesthetic of US alt-rockers such as Pavement, Tortoise, Slint and Beck.
Chief songwriter Albarn had gradually submitted to the idea and songs written
on the band’s early 1996 US tour, Song 2 and Chinese Bombs, paved the way. On
ce in the studio, Blur jammed together for the first time in years: “We’ve n
ever really jammed before,” Coxon recalled. “We’ve been quite white-coaty,
overall, about recording, like in a laboratory.”
After initial recording in London in June 1996, the band continued sessions in
a small studio in Iceland and in January 1997, a fortnight before the album’
s release, Blur unveiled lead single Beetlebum. With its descending backing vo
cals in its chorus, dissonant Come Together-esque ‘solo’ and McCartney-esque
bassline, it had more in common with The Beatles than Blur, even down to its
accidentally punsome title and rather than being mediated through a character,
its lyrics even seemed vaguely confessional. It shot to No.1 in the UK – blo
wing away any record-company fears over its commercial suitability – and set
the scene for a radically different Blur album.
It’s not ‘Graham’s album’… although it kind of is
Although the band – along with erstwhile producer Stephen Street – had clear
ly committed to the experimentation as a collective, Blur is often singled out
as ‘Graham’s album’. “Maybe I just had strong ideas this time,” Coxon sh
rugged. “I had an awful lot of sounds and styles in mind, so I collected them
together, put them through my sieve and then applied it to Damon’s songs.”
Or maybe it’s something to do with the inclusion of You’re So Great – the f
irst Blur song the guitarist wrote lyrics for and sang lead on – which is pur
e Coxon, down to its excellent manic slide solo and its self-effacing Dictapho
ne-demo production.
The guitarist has said he thought of Albarn as a good ‘enabler’ for him to ‘
become noisy’: “He used to write these short, fast things especially for me
to go berserk as a reward,” he said, somewhat self-effacingly. Yet while the
fuzz fest that is Song 2 – with its two fuzzy basslines and Shin-ei and Pro C
o RAT-drenched chorus – springs instantly to mind, Blur is about much more th
an that song’s all-out attack.
Blur -Blur
Eclectic effect tricks
The album’s opening riff alone is an insight into how Coxon sees guitars and
effects as integral to his sound. Beetlebum’s massive, chugging offbeat Tele
riff with its tight delay (from a Boss unit) couldn’t have been added later:
it’s Coxon playing the effect as part of the performance.
“Really, my guitar playing is effects playing,” he’s said, and Blur is full
of moments that illustrate what he means. Death Of A Party’s two-chord verse
s are smeared with rumbling, delayed fuzz and a chorus of unison bends and twi
n-guitar dissonance; twistedtravelogue On Your Own sees Coxon mercilessly era
dicate any sense of predictability thanks to slanted and enchanted squalls of
fuzz, feedback and swipes of the strings with a delay set to superfast. On M.O
.R., the opening riff’s frantic harmonics with added tremolo builds up the in
tensity before the band disintegrates in beautiful chaos, and Theme From Retro
is a demented waltz bathed in noise that collapses into a black hole of space
echo.
Coxon is just as compelling when he resorts to route one, as on the breakneck
powerchord workout of Chinese Bombs. You almost feel sorry for Country Sad Bal
lad Man, which starts off as an innocent, gently wonky acoustic song until Cox
on bends it out of shape with squawking shards of stoner Tele, then promptly s
mashes it to pieces with his effects.
There are also moments where the band’s orbit is genuinely perturbed and they
’re no longer writing anything approaching a pop song: Strange News From Anot
her Star’s soundscape is bleakly dystopian and Essex Dogs is a chopped-up, va
risped industrial meditation of looped delays and broken-glass guitar fragment
s, over which Albarn darkly intones free verses about panic attacks in the ter
minal pubs of his hometown.
Finally inside America
Ironically – given that it appeared on an album with a song about the trials
of ‘breaking’ America as a centrepiece, of sorts – Song 2’s “Woo-hoo”s w
ere eventually licensed for US TV ads, an episode of The Simpsons, films and g
ames and could even be heard accompanying touchdowns in sports arenas (though
notably, not to accompany the launch of the US military’s new stealth bomber)
. The album itself reached No 61 on the Billboard charts, but finally Blur had
arrived and embarked on a world tour with a major US stint.
Given that it’s a hybrid of Blur’s essential British eccentricity and the se
nsibilities absorbed from a steady diet of experimental US indie, more than tw
o decades on, Blur doesn’t really sound identifiably of a time or place. It’
s insular, eclectic and uncompromising and proves that if you give a great gui
tar player free reign, you end up with a great guitar record – and this is up
there with the best of its era.
Infobox
Blur, Blur (Food Records, February 1997)
Credits
Damon Albarn, vocals, piano, keys, guitar
Graham Coxon, guitar, vocals, drums, theremin
Alex James, bass
Dave Rowntree, drums, percussion
Stephen Street, production
John Smith, engineering
Jason Cox, engineering
Arnþór ‘Addi 800’ Örlygsson, engineering
Paul Postle, photography
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