Blur - The Great Escape [1995]

Posted on January 28, 2008 | Category: Rock

Review by darragh o’donoghue

The great escape is through buying this album, opening yuor mind to a world of possibilities, and not getting stuck in an infernal rut like the characters within it, a sorry world of automatons, stereotypes, caricatures, cliches, mannequins, marionettes and gibbering ventriloquist’s dummies.

After the enjoyable Cockney charade of ‘Parklife’, this is the real thing: a complete nightmare vision, Pynchon’s model of informaiton overload leading to entropy and inertia. Despite the 60s aesthetic of many songs, and the spanking 90s modernity of the production, this is a worldview belonging to the 70s, that of Monty Python’s stockbrokers, suicidal Reggie Perrin, Martin Amis, Mike Leigh. It is a world where prosperity and progress lead to mindless repetition - the recurrent figure in these songs is the circle: the waltz that surprisingly concludes ‘Mr Robinson’s Quango’; the fairground roundabout tinkles, where innocence has been replaced by infantilisation.

There is no escape in Damon’s bleak lyrics. The respite, the possibilities, come in the music, in this, Blur’s most restlessly inventive album. At the time of its release, there was a hyped struggle between Blur and Oasis, but there is no comparison between the latter’s laddish monotone, and Blur’s musical intelligence. Each song on this album tells of a regimented life grinding to a halt; each song fizzes with musical ideas, pilfered from a vast store of influences, the 60s rock canon, 70s post-punk, 80s American art-rock, Europop, muzak, ‘Sound Gallery’-esque functionalism, film soundtracks, lounge music, left-field experimental pop (e.g. Stereolab), half-remembered fragments from TV ads and children’s programmes.

The variety is not only between songs, but in them, where the rock-ska stomp of ‘Quango’ is interrupted by a bizarre trumpet fantasia, or the incongruous ‘Um’s that deadpan through ‘Top man’.

People have accused Damon of being too ‘ironic’, perhaps feeling cheated that songs as visionary and beautiful as ‘The Universal’ or ‘yoku and Hiro’ are actually dystopian satires of late capitalism; but surely the emotion lies in the tension between the universalising designs of the corporations decried in the lyrics, and the universal, human emotions they want to repress, expressed in the gorgeous, aching music.

Full Album Tracks Listing
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1. Stereotypes
2. Country House
3. Best Days
4. Charmless Man
5. Fade Away
6. Top Man
7. The Universal
8. Mr. Robinson’s Quango
9. He Thought Of Cars
10. It Could Be You
11. Ernold Same
12. Globe Alone
13. Dan Abnormal
14. Entertain Me
15. Yuko & Hiro

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