The weathered however hopeful The Ballad of Darren is Blur’s ninth album, and third since singer Damon Albarn launched his mega-collaborative undertaking Gorillaz.
Reuben Bastienne-Lewis/Courtesy of the artist
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Reuben Bastienne-Lewis/Courtesy of the artist
The weathered however hopeful The Ballad of Darren is Blur’s ninth album, and third since singer Damon Albarn launched his mega-collaborative undertaking Gorillaz.
Reuben Bastienne-Lewis/Courtesy of the artist
Damon Albarn has by no means wanted to return to Blur. He is in an uncommon place in that Gorillaz, the feature-heavy, rap-adjacent undertaking that has been his major concern for over 20 years, is definitely considerably extra in style than the Britpop band that made him internationally well-known within the Nineteen Nineties. So in contrast to the various veteran stars who get their bands again collectively largely out of pragmatism in a market that may be detached to mid-career artists, Albarn might simply decide out of nostalgia-driven reunion reveals and stick with teaming up with an countless revolving door of A-listers. (Cracker Island, this yr’s Gorillaz providing, options top-shelf collaborators Unhealthy Bunny, Stevie Nicks, Tame Impala and Beck.) That he continues to reconnect along with his Blur bandmates Graham Coxon, Dave Rowntree and Alex James speaks to one thing in addition to industrial necessity: loyalty maybe, but in addition an acknowledgment that he has a particular chemistry with this group that goes again to its earliest days.
The Ballad of Darren, the band’s ninth album total and third since Albarn started Gorillaz, is its most concise and low-key physique of labor. The ten songs, all written and recorded in a quick window earlier this yr in anticipation of a string of main European enviornment and competition gigs this summer time, are principally stately mid-tempo ballads that draw back from both the grandeur of orchestral pop hit “The Common” or the extra abject vein of “No Distance Left to Run.” The tone is persistently bittersweet and resigned, with Albarn singing about transferring on from a damaged relationship with the weathered perspective of somebody who’s achieved this all earlier than.
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Put one other approach, it’s totally grownup, mature work — and never in the way in which these phrases can generally be used as a pejorative, to dismiss music that does not tackle feelings with the vividness of youthful first publicity. Songs like “The Ballad” and “The Narcissist” categorical angst and remorse, but in addition a model of hope — that wounds will heal, that issues will finally work — that solely comes from accrued expertise with the cycles of life. On condition that Albarn’s lyrics have tended to skew cynical, pessimistic, or within the case of 1995’s The Nice Escape, outright misanthropic, it is a vital shift. Aside from the 1999 heartbreak suite 13, with which it shares a form of rhyming resonance, this album’s sentiments stand other than most of Blur’s catalog.
Albarn has defined that the songs that turned The Ballad of Darren weren’t initially envisioned as a Blur album. It is a indisputable fact that solely works to the report’s benefit, in that none of what is right here is straining to ship on expectations of what “Blur” is meant to be — whether or not that is the arch and virtually cartoonishly British aesthetics of Parklife or the extra arty and abrasive tones of its 1997 self-titled album. Darren‘s songs fall into an area between these extremes, a place you possibly can triangulate by listening intently to Coxon, whose enjoying holds the refined and clear guitar model of band’s prime Britpop period in equal stead with the looser, extra expressive mode of his late ’90s sound. James and Rowntree’s elegant grooves, notably on “Russian Strings” and “Avalon,” maintain the songs from sounding something like Gorillaz, nudging the fabric nearer to the texture of Burt Bacharach or later Roxy Music.
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And all through The Ballad of Darren, heard particularly powerfully on the only “St. Charles Sq.” and “Goodbye Albert,” are echoes of David Bowie. Coxon evokes Robert Fripp’s frazzled tone from 1980’s “Scary Monsters (and Tremendous Creeps)” on the previous, however the bulk of the affect really appears to return from Bowie’s twenty first century work, notably the comeback salvos Heathen and The Subsequent Day. You possibly can hear it most clearly in Albarn’s voice, which he pitches right down to a good-looking but manic baritone. Nevertheless it’s additionally there within the track constructions, preparations, and concentrate on an emotional actuality of getting old: easing into some extent of self-acceptance, whereas nonetheless very a lot making an attempt to get your act collectively.
Like Bowie, the members of Blur do not appear curious about recapturing previous glories, particularly since they have already got greater than sufficient previous favorites to fill out a setlist. The Ballad of Darren is a piece unapologetic about its personal middle-aged standpoint, and is made with the understanding that for an artist to age gracefully, they should provide listeners a perspective that would by no means have come from their youthful selves.
