Blur fleeing from Brit-pop in search of the perfect sound

Blur fleeing from Brit-pop in search of the perfect sound

Twenty-five years ago, on March 15, 1999, i Blur they published “13”, their sixth album. We celebrate its quarter of a century by rereading our review and listening to some songs.

“We were tired of writing songs.” This is in summary the thinking of Blur today, 1999. This is what led Damon Albarn and his three adventure companions to think of a record that is a thousand miles away from pop. However, if it seemed like child's play to Blur to sweep away five albums and a decade of pop songs in search of the perfect chorus and play freewheeling, as if “Girls & Boys”, “She's So High” and “Song 2” were not never been written, to us, after listening to “13”, this turn towards the new seemed a bit risky.

Of course, one would clap one's hands at a group that, perhaps out of true love of music, has abandoned guaranteed high ranking territories in honor of research. But if research means completely burying pop (that pop that we all, poor mortals, expect, consciously or not, from Blur) and embarking on a sound adventure with trip hop, post rock, ambient, dub contours, without however being able to say something significant in this area, well, then, it makes us think that Blur would have done better to write some other pop song like “Song 2”, to be screamed at the top of our lungs in a state of alcoholic alteration (the favorite one by Graham Coxon, the guitarist).

Instead “13” is a record where Damon slurs words instead of singing, where Graham has forgotten what it means to “get the catchy riff”. And so, after the low fi country gospel of the single (“Tender”, seven minutes of music, a very visible temporal dilation of the concept of pop single), Blur, with the complicity of William Orbit (already responsible for the “electronic” turning point of Madonna), they concoct 13 songs with a single goal in mind; the perfect sound. An objective that leads them towards an “environmentalisation” of pop (chill out pop) which many fans will not like and which will say very little to those who follow the electronic and post rock scene carefully.