Blur: The Narcissist review – a band finally at ease with themselves

(Parlophone)
The first single from upcoming album The Ballad of Darren chugs along to a motorik beat, rising to an anthemic refrain that seems to be reflecting on the band’s profession path

There are two sides to Blur’s sporadic reunions. There are the reside exhibits – Glastonbury in 2009, a trawl all over the world’s festivals in 2012, a worldwide area tour in 2015, an sudden one-off efficiency at considered one of Damon Albarn’s Africa Categorical events in 2019 – which are reliably rapturously acquired: an opportunity, as Graham Coxon just lately put it to “revisit all those great songs”, complete with a distinct emotional cost driven by nostalgia and the proof that the once-fractured relationships inside the band have been mended. After which there's the difficulty of recording and releasing new material.

By far probably the most adventurous band amongst Britpop’s huge league, prepared to vary and push ahead in a method their friends seldom have been, it doesn’t fit Blur’s profile to reconstitute purely as a heartwarming exercise in nostalgia. But their actual recording course of has been fraught since re-forming in 2008. Blur have been reported to have made three makes an attempt to document a new album, however solely three songs emerged, as limited edition singles; Albarn apparently called time on album sessions in 2012 midway by means of recording, much to the chagrin of producer William Orbit. Albarn likewise instructed that the tracks recorded at impromptu 2013 periods in Hong Kong would represent “a type of data that by no means comes out”, before Coxon accomplished the music in secret and invited the singer to add lyrics: Albarn seemed faintly stunned to be on the swiftly arranged press convention that announced 2015’s acclaimed The Magic Whip.