Any way you look at it, Blur are an awkward proposition.
Most of the time it feels like they just have too many right angles to ever sit anywhere comfortably; in culture, entertainment, or mass consciousness – an impression compounded by ‘The Magic Whip‘s elephantine gestation process.
Equally protracted, the well documented Coxon/Albarn make-up that made it possible was an affair which had all the softly-softly hallmarks of two mating porcupines, an event catalysed by that most rock and roll of totems, an Eccles cake.
What is undeniable is that the quartet have spent their careers extricating themselves from misunderstandings and errors of judgement. Trapped in the tab end of baggy, they were then walled in by the Britpop animal they unwittingly created, before ending up desolate on their last outing, 2003’s Coxon-less ‘Out Of Time‘. Luckily, their knack has been in finding salvation by beating the odds, embracing creative reincarnations and in doing so sticking it to event horizons which dragged every outfit around them into the cul-de-sacs of drugs, bankruptcy or queasily turning the nostalgia tour handle.
Luck of course casts a far greater shadow in the Far East, the location in which ‘The Magic Whip’ has both its musical and philosophical roots. Fortune didn’t predetermine the five days of jamming in a back street Hong Kong studio would be its foundations (a cancelled Japanese festival date did that), but the region’s ambiguous totalitarianism left a profound impression on Albarn, who subsequently wrote the album’s lyrics in 36 experience crammed hours.
Given a tendency to pupate, you might’ve have been forgiven for thinking the ‘The Magic Whip’ could be a genre-defying return to the era of their esoteric genius, a brillo pad to the face, the Blur brand of zeitgeist-snubbing awesome. You might be disappointed then: it isn’t. Resurrected as a thing by Coxon and co-produced with their old muse Stephen Street, here instead are a dozen songs with almost no pretence wrapped around them, an approach which sees the foursome consciously playing within themselves, leaving hype to be another band’s problem. At first, it’s a little disconcerting.
Put together like a jigsaw, the apparent refusal to ‘be Blur’ that the album represents makes it hard not to feel a little anti-climactic, like stacking the dominoes but then refusing to watch them fall. Opener ‘Lonesome Street‘ is a case in point, like an outtake from the almost salad days of ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish‘, overtly Kinks-ian and with Coxon diluting the knowing aesthetic for a throwaway verse or two. The whole thing sounds great by the way, a reminder of simpler times, of that euphoric, temporary identity forged in the collision of art-rock and sixties pop that presaged the mid-nineties bombast at which we all lost.
Most bands reach a point where their songs simply being – without an ulterior motive – isn’t fulfilling enough. Here though, Albarn has regressed thrillingly. ‘Ong Ong‘ might not have the energy or libido of a ‘Song 2‘ or ‘Girls and Boys‘ but, full of harmonies and played at a reassuringly middle aged chug, it’s disarmingly perfect for our all too brief British summer. In tandem with the blissful ‘Ghost Ship‘ (surely as louche sounding as they’ve ever been) the partial tone here is of a songwriter confounding everyone – by being profoundly normal.
The notion of Damo, Al, Graz and Dave all just kickin’ back around the old joanner is a diverting one, but clearly it has its limits, ones thankfully that they’re far too wily not to see. ‘The Magic Whip’ is therefore as experimental as it is introverted, most notably on ‘Ice Cream Man‘, with its odd, nursery rhyme mood, a brio embellished by electronic squiggles and also by its successor ‘Thought I Was a Spaceman‘, Albarn presiding over a song whose instrumentation moves in between distances from near to far, his flattened, sometimes distorted vocals juxtaposed against what could be the album’s finest moment.
It’s also the peak of Blur’s defiance – at least here. They do still manage to move the listener around a little more, through both the charming surf rock of closer ‘Mirrorball‘ and the choppy, throwback strut of ‘I Broadcast‘, the latter a pick and mix of styles from their mass communication period, which has the trademark chorus/chant of old but none of the provocative audacity. On ‘My Terracotta Heart‘ the lines are a little more obfuscated, Coxon’s mid-Atlantic country guitar lines reflecting the now lawyer at his subtle best.
Getting your head around ‘The Magic Whip’ is not a linear process, as our intimate knowledge of this iconic band and all their flaws means approaching it without some kind of expectation is almost impossible. What happens when you come out of the other side isn’t going to define your fandom one way or the other; for a band who have consciously or otherwise thrived on dividing opinion this comes as an unfamiliar but pleasant sensation.
Recorded in a pervasive spirit of compromise, it’s better still to think of it as the greatest set of B-sides Blur have never made, a collection of songs as invigorating as they are straightforward, leaving the where and what next to be questions for another tomorrow.
