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

(Parlophone)
The primary single from upcoming album The Ballad of Darren chugs alongside to a motorik beat, rising to an anthemic refrain that appears to be reflecting on the band’s career 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 performance at certainly one of Damon Albarn’s Africa Categorical occasions in 2019 – which are reliably rapturously acquired: an opportunity, as Graham Coxon just lately put it to “revisit all these great songs”, full with a definite emotional cost driven by nostalgia and the evidence 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 among Britpop’s huge league, prepared to vary and push forward in a method their friends seldom have been, it doesn’t match Blur’s profile to reconstitute purely as a heartwarming exercise in nostalgia. However their precise recording process has been fraught since re-forming in 2008. Blur have been reported to have made three attempts to report a new album, but only three songs emerged, as limited version singles; Albarn apparently called time on album sessions in 2012 midway via recording, a lot to the chagrin of producer William Orbit. Albarn likewise instructed that the tracks recorded at impromptu 2013 periods in Hong Kong would constitute “a type of data that never comes out”, before Coxon completed the music in secret and invited the singer so as to add lyrics: Albarn seemed faintly stunned to be at the rapidly arranged press convention that introduced 2015’s acclaimed The Magic Whip.