Blur - Think Tank
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CD Details
Artist: BlurEdition: Music CD
Format: Enhanced, Explicit Lyrics
CD Release Date: 2003-05-06
Music Label: Virgin Records Us
Soundtracks:
- Ambulance
- Out Of Time
- Crazy Beat
- Good Song
- On The Way To The Club
- Brothers And Sisters
- Caravan
- We've Got A File On You
- Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club
- Sweet Song
- Jets
- Gene By Gene
- Battery In Your Leg
Music reviews of Think Tank
Music Review: One great song, plus a lot of good singing.
Rating: 3 Stars
You'd expect any band to crash and burn after their lead guitarist left. Especially when the band is Blur, whose sound was created by Graham Coxon's scraping, dissonant guitar hooks. But Coxon left, and only plays on one song on Think Tank. The rest was written by Damon Albarn, who had been taking an interest in electronic music after the unexpected success of his Gorillaz project. And, oddly enough, it's not as bad as you'd expect. Not good -- it's probably Blur's worst album -- but not as bad as you'd expect.
In fact, Think Tank even has what is probably the last great Blur song, namely "Ambulance." Bassist Alex James compensates for Coxon's absence with a tight, funky bass hook, which only emerges toward the end, after a cinematic build-up. I love the way the song gradually rears up from the swampy drum track, and Albarn's singing is great, along with the weird distorted vocal hook. There is something to be said for Albarn's electronic experiments, sometimes.
The vocals are consistently good. At some point around the turn of the century, Albarn became an amazing singer. He was always appealing, since the Britpop days; his writing was clever and his voice dramatized it well. But purely in terms of singing ability, he wasn't very good. He had a heavily accented, off-key voice that was redeemed only by his acting abilities. But now, he's the best vocalist in popular music. In "Ambulance," his voice is a vulnerable, soft falsetto. In "On The Way To The Club," it's full of daydreaming detachment. In "Out Of Time," it's sympathetic and gentle. In "Brothers and Sisters," it takes on a husky tone that sounds all dangerous and sexy. I can't believe I just wrote that about him, but there you have it. He's just as great on the second Gorillaz album. Seems that he gets better with age. I have a lot of criticism for the album, but I've probably listened to it more times than to Modern Life Is Rubbish, and it's probably thanks to Albarn's singing.
Nonetheless, this would still have been a much better album with Coxon aboard. You can see the difference if you listen to his guitar line in "Battery In Your Leg." The song is completely bland and insubstantial, even Albarn's vocal doesn't catch one's attention, but the reverberating guitar, when it finally appears, instantly adds palpable emotion and drama. And it's not even Coxon's best guitar line, by any means. If he could do that for one song with so little effort, what might he have done for the rest of the album?
But unfortunately, Albarn wasn't interested in writing guitar songs. He may not have been interested in writing songs at all. It seems that he was unduly fascinated with Radiohead's Kid A. Press releases played up the alleged influence of world music on Albarn, but it is nowhere to be found here except in a few intros and outros. Instead, Think Tank largely consists of sleepy ballads with electronic production ("Good Song," "Sweet Song," "Caravan"), and thus is extremely similar to Amnesiac. Albarn's voice on tracks like "Caravan" even resembles Thom Yorke on "You And Whose Army?"
This strange fixation on sullen minimalism leads to a truly horrible song called "Crazy Beat," which is a carbon copy of "The National Anthem" from Kid A, except Fatboy Slim makes it even worse by adding an unlistenable croaking voice that repeats the song title endlessly. Like in "The National Anthem," the music consists of an inept rhythm. The song thankfully contains no cacophonous trumpets, but they too get their turn elsewhere on the album, in another truly horrible song called "Jets," which has the most pointless, tuneless saxophone solo that ever appeared on any rock record. Albarn tops it off with a singularly inane lyric, which mostly consists of "la la la."
The casualties go on. "We've Got A File On You" is a failed attempt to replicate "Song 2," and is even worse than "Chinese Bombs" from the self-titled album, which itself was a failed attempt to replicate "Song 2." There is one more truly horrible song in the form of a bonus track called "My White Noise," whose gratuitously profane lyrics saddled the album with a parental guidance sticker. Other songs, like "Gene By Gene," "Good Song," and "Sweet Song," are not terrible, but not very interesting either -- this is where Coxon would have been useful. Even "On The Way To The Club," the best song after "Ambulance," ends with notably inept keyboard noodling, where Coxon would have probably come up with a good guitar line.
Think Tank was probably doomed from the start. By this point, Albarn had become obviously bored with the confines of Blur. Nowadays, he's more like a theatre director than a lead singer in a band; he's all over the place with all kinds of collaborations, and recently even a Chinese opera. Perhaps his change of attitude also contributed to Coxon's departure. Whatever the reasons, Think Tank is mediocre; but at the same time, it does have one great song in "Ambulance," and the vocals make it listenable, if not good.
Description of Think Tank
To celebrate the 21st anniversary of their debut release, Blur s last (to date) album Think Tank has now been expanded across two discs, cut on heavyweight 180 gram, audiophile vinyl and housed in a replica of the original sleeve artworkCompared to the brash pop of Damon Albarn's Gorillaz side project and 1999's overtly emotional 13, Think Tank is a soulful and subtle affair?its tone possibly traceable to the departure of founding member Graham Coxon midway through its recording. There are classic Blur rock moments here, notably "Crazy Beat," which is cut from the same cloth as the classic "Song 2," and the painfully short but brilliant "We've Got a File On You," which sounds like agitprop punks Crass mixed up with a Moroccan snake charmer. But while Albarn still has an ear for a melody, without Coxon's guitars to subvert them, most of these songs sound like the work of a new band. "Caravan"'s sleepy rhythm plods at a camel's pace, while "Gene by Gene" employs cross rhythms to evoke desert images. Blur is now more about textures rather than standard rock rhythms. Some will find their evolution off-putting, but for fans who appreciate a band that refuses to sit still, Think Tank is a rewarding listen. --Caroline Butler
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