Review
With Gorillaz’ cartoon jumble of hip-hop and Britpop, and his clever Africa-meets-electronica project, Mali Music, Blur singer Damon Albarn proved he can make interesting music without his band’s founding guitarist, Graham Coxon. But on their first new album in four years, recorded in Morocco, the Coxon-less Blur seem half a band, adrift in a loopy, moody, head cold–with-a-melody sound world that falls somewhere short of Radiohead. There’s no shortage of provocative ideas or sounds — the gauzy daydream of acoustic guitars and bass in “Out of Time,” the elegiac piano ballad “Battery in Your Leg” (the only track on which Coxon plays) — but nothing has the heft or clarity of Blur’s slow-build classics “Tender” and “Beetlebum.”
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