Ah, nice, a Blur double-header. You know I was talking about wanting odd moments in music in the last post? Well, it’s nice that another song of the band’s, especially from 13, arrives right after, because that album’s filled with them. One day in either 2015 or ’16, I decided to listen through 13 from front to back, no distractions. I was interning at a music magazine at the time, I could get away with it. And it was there that I had the proper awakening moment. I found… that I actually really enjoyed the whole thing. The first time, a couple years before, I was left confused, feeling that it was a little too long with those random extra interludes, really only liking the singles I knew. The second, I got into a few other deeper cuts. But it was the thorough listen behind the iMac in the office that did the trick. The way I looked at it was, after ‘Coffee & TV’, the album just goes off the deep end, gets stranger as it goes on. If there’s anything that could be labelled as the weirdest song on 13, ‘Trailerpark’ might be the frontrunner.

The song was the first of the 13 songs to be recorded, but wasn’t originally intended to be on the track listing. It was in fact written for the South Park Chef Aid album. It was called ‘South Park’ before the name was changed. But someone on the other end said no to it. Presumably, Rick Rubin. So the band kept it for themselves. As a result, it’s the only song on 13 to be produced by the band without William Orbit. You’d never really know it without searching it up, ’cause it contains the same kind of cut-and-pasting production style Orbit would use to piece almost all the other tracks on the album. The rhythm section during the verses are an obvious loop that you can sort of hear resetting after a few measures. The punk-riff ending, the best part, sounds like it’s been added on from a completely different session. It’s such a left-turn from the rest of the song before, it caught me offguard when I was going through that relisten. Feels like everything’s been constructed piece by piece, and there is a little monster of a number that comes out of the work.

I think we all know 13 for being Damon Albarn’s breakup album and the one where he alludes to drug use a lot. ‘Trailerpark’ combines the two. In a bit of a melodic rambling mantra, the song’s main lines are “I’m a country boy, I got no soul / Don’t sleep at night, the world’s growing old / I lost my girl to the Rolling Stones”. Some exclamations of “Freestyle 45” and angular, woozy guitar breaks by Graham Coxon come in between. He also provides a “solo”, which is essentially fucking around with feedback, during the instrumental break. Oh, and that bluesy keyboard melody throughout that sounds like it’s coming from a tannoy speaker is very cool too. From what I’ve researched, ‘Rolling Stones’ is code for drugs. What kind? Up to your interpretation, I guess. And the rest is self-explanatory, I feel. For lack of a better word, the whole track is a vibe. Comments I’ve seen about it range from it being ‘lo-fi trip hop’, to sounding ‘like a precursor to Gorillaz’, to feeling like ‘walking through a dark empty mall that closed’. They’re all very valid points.