Blur
The Magic Whip
April 27 2015 (Parlophone)
8/10
Words: Alison Mack
Since Blur announced the forthcoming release of their first album in 16 years, anticipation has reigned unabated. Recorded mainly in Hong Kong over a five-day period during a break in touring in 2013, with Stephen Street producing, it is a fairly majestic return for the Nineties' Britpop kids, and you can almost follow the line of development from vintage Blur through to experimental electronica.
Opening track, the brash 'Lonesome Street', feels like a swaggering 'Parklife' leftover in essence, highlighted by Graham Coxon's riff as Damon Albarn turns his nose up at global consumer culture, before getting gooey in the chorus: "And if you have nobody left to rely on/I'll hold you in my arms and let you drift."
The album veers from the beautiful 'Terracotta Heart', the track which Coxon has described as evolving from his relationship with Albarn, and the evocative and dreamlike 'Pyongyang' - about North Korea's "silver rockets and cherry trees" - to the military style prog and Mellotron effects of the doom driven 'There Are Too Many Of Us' which fears population explosion, and the stimulating ‘Ice Cream Man’, with repetitive bleeps and clicks, and lines which transmute into Albarn’s memories of the Tiananmen Square protests.
Elsewhere, there's a laid-back, soul groove on 'Ghost Ship', and the sci-fi-ish, six minute long 'Thought I Was A Spaceman', with xylophone lightness and programmmed drums, over which Albarn's barely perceptible vocal metaphorically sings of "digging out my heart in some distant sand dune", and penultimate track 'Ong Ong’ is a la-la-la-la singalong, looped handclaps and one that will still be going through your head as the record closes on the strings and plaintive guitar of 'Mirrorball'.
'The Magic Whip' has all the magic one would expect, being whipped into shape by sound imagination and creative warmth from a band who show they still have plenty of musical mileage left in them.
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