'Bustin' + Dronin' by Blur

To co-incide with their album, 'Blur', and their creative rebirth, Blur handed out tracks to a variety of producers and asked for remixes. 'Bustin' + Dronin' is a collection of these remixes. It was created mainly for the Japanese market, but had a limited UK release, and in all honesty, that's all it deserved.

The idea behind the record was a good one, and individually, all of these remixes have their merits. Sadly, despite the range of people involved, the collection feels a bit samey - each track has been made slightly darker, slightly heavier, and slightly more morose. You never get the sense that any of the producers involved had had much fun. The Walter Wall Mix of 'On Your Own' deserves to be singled out - it's like three mixes in one, and it's fifteen minutes long, which is inexcusable.

The second disc is a live performance from John Peel's house of tracks from 'Blur', with an added rendition of 'Popscene'. This is better, showing the band at their most aggressive, but even this disc is a bit one-note - while the parent album is varied in its texture, the same can't be said of this. All in all, this is a reasonably good collection, but an ultimately unnecessary one.

‘Blur’ by Blur

Following the release, and lukewarm critical reception of ‘The Great Escape’, Blur went to great efforts to evolve, releasing this album in 1997. Listening to the album as a whole, it’s an obvious new direction for the band, but it would be a mistake to say they’d neglected their pop roots. ‘Beetlebum’ and ‘Song 2’ may have a slightly rougher arrangement than previous albums, but given a polish, they’d have both sat comfortably on earlier albums. Only with ‘Country Sad Ballad Man’ is there a real indication that Blur were entering new territory. It’s a down beat arrangement of a track, layered in slide guitar, and featuring a vocal performance from Damon Albarn that jumps through octaves like hoops. It sounds unlike anything Blur had done up to that point. The album continues in a similar vein – ‘You’re So Great’ is rougher than any tracks that had come before it, though lovely never-the-less, ‘On Your Own’ is the most awkward sounding track they’d ever released as a single, ‘Theme From Retro’ dispenses with words altogether, and pretty much loses its tune along the way, ‘Chinese Bombs’ is abrasively loud and short, and ‘Essex Dogs’ is more of a rambling stream of consciousness than a song.

Mixed into all this, however, are some great pop moments. ‘M.O.R.’ may have been derivative enough to require a writing credit for Bowie and Eno, but it’s still a great track, ‘I’m Just A Killer For Your Love’ and ‘Strange News From Another Star’ are both great, and ‘Look Inside America’, though weary, is suitably anthemic.

All in all, ‘Blur’ is a fantastic album, and testament to the fact that the band made all the right decisions before making it. It also cements their reputation for being great musicians – it’s more evidence in particular that Coxon is one of the greatest guitarists of his generation. Twelve years on, this album sounds as good as it ever did.

'13' by Blur

The first album on this listening marathon that wasn’t bought by or given to me. This was originally Tessa’s, existing in my collection only through a copy on minidisk before we got married.

‘13’ was an end-of-an-era album for the band themselves, being the last full album they would record together as a four-piece band, though they weren’t to know this at the time. Never-the-less, it sounds like a bit of an ending, and it’s hard to imagine where the journey it takes them on would have progressed to if circumstances had been different.

Having moved away from their Britpop sound with ‘Blur’, ‘13’ sees a further digression into a more experimental form of music making, and as such, it’s an album of contrasts. First single and opening track ‘Tender’ is a gentle acoustic strum-along, made rather lovely by the accompanying gospel choir, and ‘Coffee + TV’ is a fairly conventional pop song (though a fine example of the genre). The rest of the album, however, is a combination of fast, angry blasts of frantic noise (‘Bugman’, ‘B.L.U.R.E.M.I.’) and dense washes of sustained chords and multi-layered guitar noise from Graham Coxon. Of these, most are very effective – only ‘Caramel’s too short on structure or tune to make much of an impression.

Only ‘No Distance Left To Run’ stands out as separate from the main body of the album. A bleak, sparsely accompanied song about the breakdown of Damon Albarn’s relationship with Elastica’s Justine Frischmann, it’s a track which eye-wateringly confessional, but beautiful with it. Rarely has someone’s dirty washing been aired in public so effectively.