Blur’s ‘Ballad’ to bittersweet midlife

The weathered however hopeful The Ballad of Darren is Blur’s ninth album, and third since singer Damon Albarn launched his mega-collaborative venture Gorillaz. Reuben Bastienne-Lewis/Courtesy of the artist conceal caption

toggle caption 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 venture 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 venture that has been his major concern for over 20 years, is definitely considerably extra fashionable than the Britpop band that made him internationally well-known within the Nineteen Nineties. So in contrast to the numerous veteran stars who get their bands again collectively largely out of pragmatism in a market that may be detached to mid-career artists, Albarn may simply decide out of nostalgia-driven reunion exhibits and stick to teaming up with an limitless revolving door of A-listers. (Cracker Island, this 12 months’s Gorillaz providing, options top-shelf collaborators Dangerous 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 short window earlier this 12 months in anticipation of a string of main European area and competition gigs this summer season, are largely 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 shifting on from a damaged relationship with the weathered perspective of somebody who’s accomplished this all earlier than.

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Put one other method, it’s extremely grownup, mature work — and never in the best way these phrases can typically be used as a pejorative, to dismiss music that does not deal with 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 ultimately 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. Apart from the 1999 heartbreak suite 13, with which it shares a sort of rhyming resonance, this album’s sentiments stand other than most of Blur’s catalog.

Albarn has defined that the songs that grew to become The Ballad of Darren weren’t initially envisioned as a Blur album. It is a incontrovertible fact that solely works to the document’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 nearly 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’ll be able to triangulate by listening carefully to Coxon, whose taking part in 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, significantly 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 one “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 come from Bowie’s twenty first century work, significantly the comeback salvos Heathen and The Subsequent Day. You’ll be able to hear it most clearly in Albarn’s voice, which he pitches down to a good-looking but manic baritone. However it’s additionally there within the track constructions, preparations, and give attention to an emotional actuality of growing old: easing into some extent of self-acceptance, whereas nonetheless very a lot attempting to get your act collectively.

Like Bowie, the members of Blur do not appear eager 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 want to supply listeners a perspective that would by no means have come from their youthful selves.