After literal years of speculation, misdirection, and rumo(u)rs in the music press, the British band Blur announced this morning at a live video press conference in a London Chinese restaurant that The Magic Whip, their first new album since 2003's Think Tank—but really their first real album since 13 in 1999—will be released on April 28. It was recorded in Hong Kong in 2013, and co-produced by their best studio collaborator, Stephen Street. In addition, a new song from the album, entitled “Go Out,” arrived on YouTube. The song leans more toward the art pop sensibility that fueled the band’s late-middle period work, than the hitmakery of their Britpop heyday. Nonetheless, it still betrays the fact that no matter how obscurantist or experimental Damon Albarn may secretly yearn to be, he simply can’t open his mouth without catchy melodic hooks tumbling out like coins from a slot machine.
The last time Blur tried to make a record, they broke up. Since the 2003 release of Think Tank (which is only 75% of a Blur record—at most—because guitarist Graham Coxon is barely on it), a few things have happened: Damon Albarn has become the most prolific pop musician in Europe (fronting Gorillaz, writing opera, releasing a solo album, and generally collaborating with anyone he feels like), Graham Coxon got (at least partially) sober and started making pop records himself, and bassist Alex James moved to a house a really big house in the country to become a cheesemaker. Blessed are the cheesemakers.
Most importantly, however, the band did what all broken up bands who were once famous are now required to do and reunited for a tour in 2009. The results of that glorious reunion are chronicled in the captivating documentary No Distance Left To Run and its accompanying live video of the band’s truly staggering concerts in Hyde Park, London. Sadly—or maybe, let’s face it, happily, given how these reunited groups’ new material tends to be—the band hasn’t followed up the reunion shows with any new music aside from "Fool's Day" (a Record Store Day offering) in 2010 and “Under the Westway,” a pleasingly blue, somewhat desultory single in 2012.
But now, now, now, all that has changed. And that is good news.
Pre-ordering for the requisite multiplicity of packaged editions is live on iTunes, Blur’s official store on Warner Music, and on Amazon.co.uk—and comes with a free download of “Go Out.”
Blur will play shows in England, and according to their live video press conference this morning will entertain the possibility of dates in the U.S. (a territory toward which the band’s attitude has alternated between hauteur, hostility, and coquettishness) “if anyone’s interested.”
Let me be the first—or, indeed the 50,000th—to say, WE’RE INTERESTED.
The Magic Whip track list:
01. Lonesome Street
02. New World Towers
03. Go Out
04. Ice Cream Man
05. Thought I Was A Spaceman
06. I Broadcast
07. My Terracotta Heart
08. There Are Too Many Of Us
09. Ghost Ship
10. Pyongyang
11. Ong Ong
12. Mirrorball
"Under the Westway"
