Blur — The Ballad of Darren
Album review of first Blur album in eight years
Every Blur album has had a reflective, beautiful, impossible to pigeonhole track, from Wear Me Down on Leisure, Blue Jeans on Modern Life is Rubbish, to Pyongyang on The Magic Whip — and The Ballad of Darren is full of them.
A Blur album has been a big deal since their debut Leisure in 1990. In the 21st century they have been arriving by the decade rather than by the year, but Albarn, Coxon, James and Rowntree, just like at the height of Parklife-mania back in the mid-90s, continue to hone their craft. Blur can make a hefty claim to being the UK’s premier art rock band, having collected all their influences from the The Kinks to XTC the first time around, to influencing everyone from The Libertines to Everything Everything in their wake.
The Ballad of Darren — not unlike Will Self’s The Book of Dave — is a concept album and character study of a postmodern English male: basically Dan Abnormal (Damon’s alter ego) updated for the culture war generation. The Ballad introduces Darren blurrily enough, melancholic chord changes at every turn, before St Charles Square takes us into firm Wire territory, as Damon/Dave confesses ‘I fucked up’.
TBOD also sounds like Blur’s finest London album since Parklike, the great capital being arguably their favourite muse. ‘I’ll be hitting the hard stuff’ sings Damon in Russian Strings, as a languid and confident sounding Graham Coxon crafts wonderfully, on every track. It can’t be denied that Blur do feel in a more comfortable skin, all these years after their cynical 90s height of popularity, but it looks good on them.
As on Damon’s recent solo albums, the tone is often reflective, like This Is A Low of the contemporary spirit, humming through the algorithms. Lead single The Narcissist already feels like a Snow Patrol-shaped standard, Damon riffing of the current obsession with self-obsession, as he says ‘I will shine the light in your eyes — you’d probably shine it back on me’. The track is also a welcome return to ‘the earworm’ for perhaps the first time since Coffee & TV.
Goodbye Albert takes us into heartbreaking Yuko & Hiro territory, as Graham’s guitar wobbles lachrymose beneath Damon’s vocodered melancholy, like Pete Doherty guesting with Kraftwerk in Paddinton Basin. Avalon is a nod to The Good, The Bad & The Queen territory, Damon’s real impressions of modern English life seen through his middle-aged slacker prism: ‘The glass is still half full’.
Slight, brief, mature and knowing, The Ballad of Darren is full of the gorgeous details careful listeners associate with Blur beyond the old tabloid headlines: a reputation the band seem determined to decry on their sporadic, if consistently stunning, statements.
https://open.spotify.com/album/0gIZSG9WUDO3TK0B5y7UtU?si=i6ae0kOMTQms2c_D7D5X3Q&nd=1
