SPIN THINK TANK review: Grade A
http://www.saunalahti.fi/~hynninen/vblurpage/articles/reviews/albums/think_sreview.htm
Blur - Think Tank (Reviewed by SPIN)
Britpop veterans embrace the world
“I ain’t got nothing to be scared of,” sings Damon Albarn on Blur’s
seventh album, and means it as both an opening gambit and a mission
statement. Since his breakup with Justine Frischmann in 1998, Albarn has
discovered hip-hop, monkeyed with Gorillaz, gone native in Mali, and raged
against the war machine. Unfortunately, America’s response has been a
half-hearted “woo-hoo,” usually between periods at hockey games.
No matter—the world’s a big place. After spending act one of their career
in archly Victorian fashion—skewered snooty Englishisms, exoticizing the
dog track, engaging in horseplay behind the manor—Blur have reinvented
themselves as boldly postcolonial popsters. Think Tank’s songs aren’t
merely multicultural, they’re multilateral, recorded partly in Morocco
and sung in a musical polyglot Hoovered up from stray corners of the empire:
aspects of Afrobeat, bits of bhangra, images of Islam. With guitarist
Graham Coxon missing in action, the rhythm section of Alex James and Dave
Rowntree steps up, and the album shuffles and grooves like Fela Kuti
sloshed on gin and tonics. Opener “Ambulance” surprises with skronking
saxes; “Sweet Song” and “Caravan” ooze and shudder with a world-weary
melancholy.
Back on the home front, Fatboy Slim funks up “Crazy Beat” (suggested
alternate title: “Song 3”). But the track’s escapist laddism feels forced
and hollow. The far better “We’ve Got a File on You,” with jackbooted
punk noise interrupting the sound of a Muslim prayer call, cops to the
uglier side of Britpop’s rah-rah nationalism. The album’s highlight
may be the failure-soaked, heart-stoppingly lovely “Out of Time,” which
perfectly captures the jumble of beauty and dread the defines life under
orange alert. “Are we out of time?” Albarn asks, desperate for one last
peace march or one last snog. Emboldened by politics, fatherhood, or some
primo Jamaican ganja, Albarn has learned what the Pentagon has not: The
planet is its own Total Information Awareness Network. As he sings near
the end of the album, “You’ve got a battery in your leg.” Either plug
in or get out of the way.
Grade: A Andy Greenwald
SPIN, June 2003
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