There's one thing oddly last about lavish CD field units. Their completeness seems to say: "This is it." These interested in Blur's future – already gloomy on the news that they've apparently abandoned a new album, and at the elegiac quality of their current new music, the gorgeous Under the Westway – may be forgiven for heaving a sigh at the arrival of 21, which collects nearly each notice Blur have released with 4 CDs of stuff they beforehand hadn't.
Definitely, 21 is exhaustive, virtually to a fault. There are nice things among the B-sides and unreleased tracks: their collaboration with Marianne Faithfull, Kissin' Time; the unfastened, Can-like funk of Music Is My Radar. Nonetheless, it is a hardy soul who makes it during, say, the version of She's So Excessive that consists of the two-line refrain repeated in a strangulated yodel for 11 minutes, punctuated by slap bass, or the three versions of Pink Necks, a grindingly unfunny joke country monitor from the CD single of Finish of the Century. In contrast to their nice Britpop rivals, Blur audibly weren't in the enterprise of squandering the great things on B-sides.
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