It is with some trepidation that I bought Think Tank, Blur's new album. This was tempered with chagrin when I discovered that I could have obtained it for free, from the school paper, had I waited for a few days. I've only listened to it once so far, not nearly enough to have formed an opinion yet. So all I have is 'Out Of Time', the single, which I downloaded a while ago. That alone would not be enough for me to do a column on, but 'Out Of Time' is happily enough one in a long line of my favorite kind of Blur songs, the heartsick ballad, and I've been listening to them a lot recently.
Last week was, for all intents and purposes, my party week. Tuesday night to Friday night, inclusive, I was somewhere that was not my apartment, drinking at least a little, and staying up late. Considering how often I could afford to do this during school (i.e. maybe on the weekends), this was a lot of fun, culminating in a fairly major drunk at the Albion and Underground on Friday. This ended with some of my friends being quite sick, although thankfully I dodged that bullet. I then went home with K. for Mother's Day. Bit of recuperation. The reason for no normal journal entries in the interim is the simple fact that nothing else really happened. I've been lazy.
On Friday, at the Albion, I put on one of my customary Albion jukebox songs, Blur's 'I'm Just A Killer For Your Love'. In its lurching, uneasy guitar line, muttered vocals and vaguely menacing sentiment, it is the perfect song for hunching over a table with a few chums and murdering a pitcher or five. 'I'm Just A Killer For Your Love' comes from Blur's self-titled album, which was the first thing I ever bought by them (and, serindipitously enough, the most recent I bought, after getting rid of it a while ago).
I was not one of the 'Song 2' converts, not really. I'd heard it, and liked it, but this was when I had just started reading NME, and the reviews for Blur's albums were (at the time) uniformly glowing. So I picked it up, and really liked it. Living at the time in a town of 6,000, with only a Radio Shack selling CDs, meant that when said Radio Shack stocked anything I even recognized, I snapped it up. Such was the case with 13, Blur's next album, which was nothing if not a change, but again, I liked it. I didn't have the baggage involved with starting to listen to the band back in the Modern Life Is Rubbish era. I have since picked up The Great Escape (choosing it over Parklife solely because it had 'The Universal' on it).
So, unlike a lot of Blur fans, I don't view each new song and album through the prism of "well, it's not as good as their classic stuff". 'Out Of Time' still appeared at first listen to be rather underwhelming. It's Damon and his acoustic, with various sound effects*. Not as sweeping as 'The Universal' or 'This Is A Low', nor as despondent as 'He Thought Of Cars' (still one of my favorite Blur songs) or 'Yuko And Hiro'. Nevertheless, 'Out Of Time' shares an ancestry with all those songs.
The most notable thing about 'Out Of Time' to me is that it seems like Damon is singing to himself. This is not a criticism, necessarily; if Blur is a great band, as many have contended (including myself on occasion), then it is the sort of great band that have been self-reflexive from the very start. My cursory reading of Think Tank seems to show that Damon is very much over Justine, at least in terms of airing his dirty laundry in public, and so the lines You've been so busy lately, that you haven't found the time/To open up your mind/And watch the world spinning, gently out of time find their most appropriate target in Damon himself. And if 'Out Of Time' is a gentle rebuke to the singer himself rather than grandiose tales of loss that generally inhabit Blur's songs, than this can only point to a more mature outlook from the band, Graham Coxon's departure notwithstanding.
Also note that in most songs by Blur or elsewhere, the "world spinning gently out of time" line would not be a good thing. Not only does the delivery here take away any sort of menace or fear from it, but the world 'gently' would seem an odd juxtaposition if that wasn't the way Damon sang it. But his delivery turns it from some vague disaster into something that sounds natural, peaceful even. There is a reproach here, but it's more rueful than anything else. Later in the song, after these lines he adds Tell me I'm not dreaming/But are we really out of time?, which only reinforce what Damon says in Think Tank's first track, 'Ambulance': No I ain't got nothing to be scared of.
The impression, ultimately, is not one of doom, but of fate. If before Blur Blur had social anxiety (as do all good social critics), and during it and 13 we see the turmoil of a relationship and a band ripping themselves apart (although Blur seem to have survived the amputation successfully), Think Tank finds Blur, and Damon, at peace with themselves for the first time. If that adds a bittersweet tang to the proceedings, it doesn't necessarily have to reduce Blur's effectiveness.
The reason 'He Thought Of Cars' is one of my favorite Blur tracks is, of course, the chorus: He thought of cars and where, where to drive them/And who to drive them with/But there, there was no-one/No-one are some of the saddest lines around in their utter despair - not only have the character's ambitions shrunk to thinking about cars, but even there he is resolutely defeated at every turn. And above and beyond that, Damon's performance is one that must be heard - heartbreaking not for the sadness in his voice, but in the dull, hopeless monotone he adopts, mirroring his subject. Many of Blur's older songs were like this, and while it didn't exactly quiet any fears of Damon cracking up, they were great songs. Now he sounds well-adjusted, and if that's to be devoutly desired on the one hand, on the other there's the question of whether he can still tap into the part of himself that lets him make such great songs. Because 'Out Of Time' is a good song, maybe even a very good one, but not a great one.
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*Of course, closer examination reveals 'Out Of Time' is a full band song, albeit a quiet one. It's the impression of minimalism that I'm referring to here, which in itself is interesting, as Blur's ballads generally don't take that tack.
