Tag Archives: blur

#1409: Blur – Trailerpark

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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.

#1408: Blur – Tracy Jacks

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Only four songs from Parklife on here, huh? That makes sense for me. Really, it should be six, but I was going through a period, when I was doing the G section, where I was questioning whether or not I actually liked ‘Girls & Boys’. I do. And I’m a big fan of ‘The Debt Collector’. But it’s too late to change things now. I wouldn’t argue with anyone who says Blur’s 1994 album is their best. It is a definite classic, a touchstone in the Britpop era. It’s not my favourite album of the band’s, though. The compositions are concise, very well-produced and the songwriting’s stellar. But I’ve always felt there’s something very… clean about Parklife. Like, the songs sound a little too perfect, nearly mechanical somehow. It works for the songs I really like and have written about before, but throughout a whole album, I don’t know, seems a little strange for my ears. I’m probably one of the few who prefers The Great Escape because of this, even if it does get dismissingly labelled as Parklife’s sequel.

All that being said, I’ve still got a lot of love for ‘Tracy Jacks’. It’s the second song on Parklife. I’m not sure I cared all that much for it when I went through the album in full the first time in 2013. But Blur were up and about again. The band had done Coachella that year. They’d done Glastonbury in 2009. They played in Hyde Park after the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Those performances were on YouTube. ‘Tracy Jacks’ was played at all of them. Had to guess it was quite the popular deeper cut among the fans. And general repeated listens to it over the years made the track more endearing. It’s another of Damon Albarn’s character sketch songs, which he was all over in the mid-’90s, concerning a fellow whose name makes the song’s title. Tracy Jacks leads a somewhat mundane lifestyle. As he feels the end of his days rapidly approaching as he passes the age of 40, he seeks out thrills, but probably goes off the deep end with the biggest act of bulldozing his own house down. There’s maybe a little bit of Tracy Jacks in all of us, but, you know, gotta keep him suppressed because society looks down upon the things he does in the song.

The big thing that gets to me in this one? I think it’s the vocals by Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon. Coxon calls out ‘Tracy Jacks’ repeatedly in the verses, a hook in themselves, with Albarn responding with the character’s situations in each line. And this goes on before the two sing together on the choruses, Coxon taking the higher harmony, coming down on the cathartic “Just so overrated” line before rinsing and repeating. I like the sort of marching rhythm the track takes on during those sections too. Thinking about it further, Graham Coxon might just be the main man throughout the whole thing. Everything from the guitar chords during the verses, the lines he’s pulling off during the choruses, the alternating between the two during the outro, the echoing siren-like wails during the break. They’re all like little melodic trips in themselves, they really burrow themselves into the noggin. After the excitement ad hype ‘Girls & Boys’ starts everything off with, it’s nice that ‘Tracy Jacks’ lets things ride out a little. Contains the same appeal, but just a little smoother.

#1353: Blur – There’s No Other Way

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Blur may be one of my favourite bands. But their debut album Leisure isn’t one that I think to listen to all that often. In some artists’ cases, the debut album becomes the benchmark to which the rest of their work is compared. Not throwing out any names. There are some obvious examples out there. Blur went on to make much better albums than their first. Damon Albarn called Leisure “awful”, just to show how much he cares for it. It’s not an authentic representation of the band, and was more influenced by the shoegaze and Madchester scenes that were around at the time. But we all have to start somewhere. And even on this awful album, there a few tracks on there that are essential to the band’s discography as a whole. You’ve got the opener, ‘She’s So High’, the group’s very first single. ‘Sing’ is the somewhat experimental jam and one that people may know from Trainspotting. But the standout, least to me, is one of the album’s other singles, today’s subject, ‘There’s No Other Way’, which I think the band are proud ’cause they usually play it live at every opportunity.

My first experience with the song? Well, it’s a bit like a few others. One of those times when I saw the music video (above) for it on TV, but it was ending, so I wasn’t really aware of what was going on. If you want to what happens in it, Blur sit in with a family at the dinner table and have a three-course meal. Damon Albarn plays, I think, a moody teenager role, making death stares into the camera lens while sporting a ridiculous bowl haircut. Things get freaky when the massive trifle is brought out for dessert. And then the video ends. Probably afraid that the video was just a bit too British-looking, someone convinced the band to do another music video for the song specifically for American audiences. Which one’s better, I’ll let you decide. The original UK video would show up here and there every now and again, and the track’s chorus is repetitive enough that it’ll get stuck in your brain anyway. I got the band’s Best Of compilation, the song’s the third on there, and I’ve been able to listen to it whenever I wanted ever since.

I think I read that the track was written to appease either their record label owner David Balfe who was demanding they write a single to be included on the album. So, in response, the band wrote this upbeat, Madchester-inspired track with a chorus that’s repeated to death. The first line, “You’re taking the fun out of everything”, sums up Albarn’s feelings about this constant pressure forced upon him. He just wants to breathe without this presence breathing down his neck. It wouldn’t be the last time they’d write a tune made to wind Balfe up too. I think Graham Coxon is the real MVP of the entire thing. His riff starts it off, he brings in another riff during the verses, then there’s that little lick that plays after the choruses – all of which I find myself singing along to, sometimes more than Albarn’s vocal. They all go hand in hand. Plus, there’s the backwards guitar solo, which must have taken some time to figure out when writing it the right way round. And away from his guitar skills are his higher harmonizing backing vocals, “There’s no other way, ahhhh ahhhh ahhh” and others. You’ll know when it’s him singing. A very fun song, overall. It’s always a good time.

#1344: Blur – Tender

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My first impression of the studio version of ‘Tender’ wasn’t one of a positive note. After seeing music videos for Blur on the television quite regularly in the mid-2000s and liking nearly every song that came along with them, I was brainwashed into requesting Blur: The Best Of, I think, for my 11th birthday in 2006. On it was all the good stuff. ‘Beetlebum’, ‘The Universal’, ‘Girls & Boys’. You know, the singles. But there was ‘Tender’, a song that was almost eight minutes, right in the middle of it all. Eight minutes more or less feel like 30 when you’re 11, especially if you’re trying to focus on one thing for that amount of time. I was bored. Might have even fast-forwarded through it. But it might have been the music video for it (below) that made me come around to the song. It’s a live performance. The band play the track with a lot more gusto, the London Community Choir really make their presence known when it’s their time to sing, That, I could work with. It took me a long time to come round on the tune as it appears on 13 as a result.

13. The Blur album heavily influenced by Damon Albarn’s breakdown after his breakup with longtime girlfriend Justine Frischmann. It’s the band at the most experimental and downright insane at times, and it’s my favourite of Blur’s. ‘Tender’ starts it all. I think it and ‘No Distance Left to Run’ are the two tracks on there that tackle the breakup subject head-on. While the latter captures Albarn probably at the point where the split has just happened and left him devastated, ‘Tender’ seems to depict him where enough time has passed but he’s still left waiting for love to come his way again. A lot of sadness links the two tracks together, they’re almost like sister songs, but that tone of determination and optimism from ‘Tender’ allows it to seem much more upbeat than it really us. Plus it’s played in a higher tempo, so that would obviously help too. The proceedings are aided by Graham Coxon’s lyrical section, a chorus in itself, “Oh my baby, oh my baby, oh why, oh my”, that is usually repeated by thousands of concert-goers for minutes on end after the band finish playing it live. It’s like a national anthem, almost.

So, yeah, almost eight minutes this song goes on for and it starts the album off. I see comments online that openly admit to beginning 13 with ‘Bugman’, feeling that ‘Tender’ is out of place and gets things underway too slowly and preferring the song under any instance it’s done in a live setting in comparison. I’ve come to appreciate the studio ‘Tender’ and the live ‘Tender’ in their own respective ways. But honestly, I can understand those people’s sentiments. You can hear edits in the studio track where a verse is cut off to make way for the guitar solo (about four minutes in). At 5:17, the percussion cuts out quite sharply to make way for Albarn’s arriving vocal. For the meditative, contemplative track ‘Tender’ is, it can get quite messy production wise. But then again, 13 is a very messy album in a great, great way. So in the context of it, I think ‘Tender’ is a fine opener. Plus, it’s all the more better being followed by ‘Bugman’, because its buzzing guitar hitting your ears right after ‘Tender’ fades out is the big sign that the album won’t be quite what you’re expecting.

#1334: Blur – Tame

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So Blur’s The Great Escape was released 30 years ago this September just gone. The anniversary will be celebrated with a special 30th anniversary edition, a reissue that, when it was first announced, was mocked and ridiculed by many a Blur fan because of the over-the-top eyesore of a cover that comes along with it. I was surprised when I heard the album was getting this treatment. Although I like it quite a bit myself, I’m a guy who prefers it over Parklife, the LP and the time surrounding it are things that even the members of Blur don’t look back on too fondly. Damon Albarn once described Escape as “messy” and having songs that would be good for a musical. But with this whole Britpop revival thing going on now – Oasis reuniting, Pulp reuniting, Suede releasing new material, Supergrass out and about – someone must have had the idea to capitalise on the occasion.

‘Tame’ isn’t on The Great Escape, but was released as a B-side on the ‘Stereotypes’ single in 1996. I lurk on the videos for the song on YouTube, and some comments go along the lines of, “Oh, this song’s so good! How didn’t this make it on the album?” Well, it’s most likely the case that it didn’t exist during the actual sessions for the album and was written and recorded after its release as B-side material, as bands would regularly do back in those days. Another thing that’s regularly agreed about the song, is how it’s sort of a precursor to the inward-looking, first-person narrative material that was to come on the band’s next album in ’97. Albarn sings about seeing two planes in the sky, game shows on the TV and his thoughts on, I’m guessing, his girlfriend’s confusion about the weather. And among all this is a chorus of the word ‘Tame’, sung repetitively in falsetto. What it has to do with the rest of the song, I still don’t know to this day.

Overall, I think it’s a song about boredom and that sometimes existential dread that comes with waking up in the morning and having to face another day. I just get that from the lyrics and the minor-keyness of everything. There’s something a little spooky about ‘Tame’, a little uncanny. Like, those erratic synths on the right-hand side. They scratch an itch, but they’re very randomly played. Albarn must have just felt like messing around on the keys to shake things up a bit. The short-tape delay effect added to the drums makes what would be a very ordinary drum break into a very effective one. And those constant “Tame” vocals are kind of weird enough, but they’re suddenly made all the more strange when at four minutes, the choice was made to switch from Albarn’s falsetto vocal to his chest vocals where he sounds like he’s almost yelling in pain. I’m a big fan of this one. The band don’t like that period of their time, but a few of their best B-sides were made during it. Too bad that with this B-side mark, they will never regularly play it live on the regular. But they did once upon a time, and you can hear that below.