Blur
Midlife: A Beginner’s Guide to Blur - EMI
FILTER Grade: 85 %

Of the Class of ’94, Blur was clearly the best of the lot—not just because the band wrote the catchiest tunes but because it also made entire albums (Modern Life is Rubbish, Parklife) whose cheeky but disturbingly Orwellian visions would prove shockingly accurate. Apres Britpop…le deluge!

In “honor” of Blur’s recent reformation is this non-chronological (and arguably incomplete) journey through its evolution from trendy mods (“She’s So High”) to riotous social critics (“Parklife”) to emotionally formed adults (“Tender”). That the group could go from the sneering jauntiness of “Girls and Boys” to the paranoid anxiety of “Song 2” with no drop in hook-effectiveness is startling in itself; that it managed to continuously and effortlessly navigate the incomprehensible expanse between The Kinks and Brian Eno is an utterly singular achievement. But for all those hooks, Blur’s most towering legacy is as that of a modern band who would never slink from taking on the modern world’s sundry empty promises. “The Universal” stingingly decries the cheap-fix ethic imported from nasty old America and “Advert” snarls at the zombie effects of media. Even if Blur was right that modern life is nothing more than a heap of bloody rubbish, at least they deserve credit for soundtracking the rot.