Start playing the video now and it could be over around the time you finish reading...
Parklife may be the album that sold pajillions, and the brilliant 13 may be their creative highpoint, but I maintain Blur's best album is Modern Life Is Rubbish. Rarely has the sound of a band reinventing itself - saving itself, arguably - sounded so good. An album that was so strong they could afford to leave manifesto single Popscene off it. Okay, so maybe it was also the last Blur album not to top the UK chart, but what do we care for charts here at Amusement Towers?
Part of what made the album feel so vital, in the 'alive' sense rather than in the 'must have' sense, is that it felt like the band were packing everything in, just in case they didn't get another go at it. Each side concludes with a quick instumental workout, the sort that sound like the band were just playing with ideas in the studio and committed some to tape. Side One ends with the appropriately titled Intermission, tacked onto the end of Chemical World. Side Two notionally concludes with the decidedly downbeat Resigned but maybe someone, somewhere, felt it wasn't such a good idea to end on a low (they'd do that on the next album, of course) and so this jaunty little thrash was tacked on the end. I see the title as optimistic too - Commercial Break implies the band still felt, or at least hoped, there was more to come, even if some of those around them at the time were doubtful. Maybe, then, this is the sound of Britpop hoving into view... but we shouldn't hold that against it, right?
To be fair, it took me longer than 58 seconds to read that. And when I did press play, I was expecting to hear "Food processors are great!" but I guess that's elsewhere on the album.
ReplyDeleteAh, yes. That's the intro to Advert, I think.
DeleteI didn’t buy any Blur albums through the 90s as I always knew someone else who did and so I experienced the albums through them. Actually, I seem to have continued that well into the 21st century…
ReplyDeleteAll of which preamble is to say that I liked Modern Life Is Rubbish, not least the singles. To these uneducated ears, it sounded like Blur at their most inspired by The Kinks and Small Faces, even more so than what followed.
I heard Chemical World again the other day and yep, still feel that way.
Completely agree with those musical touchstones. Musically, more Small Faces, and lyrically very much a successor to Ray Davies (and Paul Weller, perhaps) in its documentation of contemporary humdrum life.
Delete