2005

Earlier this month, I was binge listening some CD-R's that I burned in 2005 and early 2006.  I've written about late-2003/early-2004 being a transformative time for me, the last stand for brick and mortar music stores as my main source for new music.  I'm only now beginning to appreciate the significance of that 2005/2006 stretch, perhaps as an equally transformative time.

2005 was my peak year, no doubt, for keeping up with the widest variety of new music and criticism. My posting frequency during that time is a clear testament to this.  I listened to about twice as many new releases as I have in a typical year, before or since.  And because I moved in mid-2006, this period had a definitive end point and was extensively archived in the forms of these CD-R's.  

This mini-era was preserved like no other, because with the founding of Youtube in 2005, the growth of other streaming services shortly thereafter, and data storage becoming ever cheaper, it was the end of CD-R's as a preferred medium.  These twenty or so CD-R's now look like lost relics from a forgotten information age.  I carefully handled them and played them as you would a valuable piece of vinyl rediscovered decades later in a hidden attic. 

Besides mp3 copies of albums, I saved a trove of live recordings: lots of Animal Collective, noise artists, some techno, cool rare gems like a "Contino Sessions"-era Death In Vegas gig.  There were also CD-R's of individual tracks that I presumably found via yousendit links and file sharing programs.  Lots and lots of Michael Mayer and Jacques Lu Cont remixes and similarly styled club techno of the day.  This era of techno came to a crashing end for me too, as I stopped buying vinyl and collecting remixes by the usual suspects, and shifted my focus to podcasts and hitting the clubs more often.    

My thoughts on Blur in 2019

Outside of a few scattered mentions, my last post focusing on Blur was over eight years ago.  I can't recall how it started, but this week I fell down the rabbit hole and listened to a ton of Blur, and rewatched the "No Distance Left To Run" documentary for the first time since my initial review back in 2011.

I still stand by everything I wrote about it back then -- it's still a powerful documentary and you won't find a better summation of the band in under two hours.  It's arranged like a sequence of postcards, with each one recalling a specific scene in the history of the band.  There's no narrator and no linear style of storytelling (plenty of important stuff is skimmed or skipped over entirely), which is the film's greatest strength.  Band histories are complex, and this one focuses on the personalities of the players, not their specific achievements, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks (hopefully by diving deeper into their music).  This is the point they want to drive home, specifically, that the reunion came about because of their need to repair their friendships.  The fact that they were successful in doing so is the main reason that the reunion can work.  To understand this, they had to bare their personalities for the camera, and in doing so, one sees how much they all were, and still are, polar opposites.  And yet the combination works.  On second viewing, I felt even more sorry for Graham, a shy soul who could have been truly happy recording and practicing in a home studio for his entire adult life, yet was swept along into the adventures of Britain's biggest 90's bands.  I was sold on Alex's book, published more than a decade, and really must pick it up. Dave ... didn't say much.  And Damon still comes off as a bit of an arrogant prick.  However, seeing how the Blur reunion has now survived further tours and even a new album ("The Magic Whip", which I still have not heard in full), he comes off more genuine than he did in 2010 or 2011, one can no longer argue that he sees Blur as an ego-boosting vanity project. 

"Parklife", the album, sounds more and more like the product of a specific time and place.  It still has brilliant moments, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.  The "character" songs are more preening, and very formulaic.  The self-titled album has probably aged the least of all their records.  The Pavement-influenced stuff is still as sharp as it was back then, the Beck-influenced stuff not so much. 

Demos: I finally heard the original "Death of a Party", which was first recorded years before its eventual release on "Blur" and was referenced in Select's well-known "Compleat Blur" articles in 1995.  The lyrics and melody survived intact, but the style underwent a radical overhaul, from bouncy indie pop to the bleak, trip-hop influenced version they eventually released.  The spark is clearly there and it's surprising that they sat on it for so long. 

"Far Out" started as a bouncy pub rocker close to the style of "Intermission".  On its own its really quite brilliant, but s a four minute extended joke on "Parklife" it would have been snowed and forgotten amongst the Britpoppy songs. As a one minute sci-fi spookfest, it's a standout. 

"For Tomorrow" is a monotonic, caterwauling mess and it goes to show how important a strong vocal and arrangement can be for making a song work.