by Tom Johnson
This album wasn’t initially as well received as I think it should’ve been. It wasn’t the masterpiece I was hoping for, but it was a step up from the wildly uneven 13. With the exit of guitarist/fellow-mastermind Graham Coxon, Damon Albarn pretty much had complete artistic control of Blur. Not surprisingly, the result sounds more like a mixture of his hip-hop-ish “side project” the Gorillaz with the Brit-rock experimentation of Blur. I can’t say the album begged me to listen to it like Broken Social Scene’s did when it came out, but every time I did listen to Think Tank I was consistently surprised by how much more I enjoyed it than I thought I previously had. With relatively few slip-ups, Blur managed to craft a new sound for themselves after what I thought was a pretty shoddy album (13), combining the best of everything the band’s been capable of. Maybe it’s a little too varying, which explains the album’s lack of strong backing by critics and fans alike. I don’t know; all I can say is that I like it a lot.
‘Half Notes’ are quick-take thoughts on music from Something Else! Reviews, presented whenever the mood strikes us.
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