Blur – The Ballad of Darren (Parlophone)

Blur’s return is even more magical this time around, with new record The Ballad of Darren as brilliant as it is emotionally vulnerable

Damon Albarn has a way with melancholy. Blur may have reconvened to play a series of live shows, yet some alchemical reaction in a chemical world took place and we also get The Ballad of Darren, the band’s majestic ninth album. There’s once again a sense of renewal about Blur (resting on laurels has never been a problem for this lot), although Albarn’s lyrics probably document the end of a relationship. The new record, their first in eight years, hits the sweet spot between the hurt of personal loss and the joy of communal experience. It is quietly life-affirming in a world where hope is an unsteady, possibly drunken, companion.

That sense of being part of something bigger than ourselves was very much evident at Blur’s Sunday night Wembley performance. The notion that the sold out Saturday would be attended by the Blur hardcore, leaving Sunday for the more casual fan, proved unfounded; there was an awful lot of love in that giant room and connections were most definitely made. It also made me realise that I was far more invested in Blur’s catalogue than I’d given myself credit for. In other words, turning over Albarn’s own from “Barbaric”, I got a feeling back that I’d forgotten I ever had. “The Narcissist” had already fast become an anthem in our house, so perhaps I should have known. I may not necessarily think of Blur as a defining band for me, but they’ve been there for me down through the years. And if you’re wondering which side I took in that historic battle of the bands, I bought both Blur and Brighten the Corners.

The Ballad of Darren sounds like a coda without asserting itself as a closing statement on Blur. Endings dissolve into unknowable beginnings rather than dissipate entirely. Albarn’s “You have lost / The feeling that you thought you’d never lose” refrain from the emotionally scarred, but perkily new wave “Barbaric” dovetails satisfyingly with that of the plaintive and restrained “Far Away Islands”: “I know you think I must be lost now, but I’m not, anymore”. The music is as restlessly playful as ever, Graham Coxon’s gently sobbing guitar winding around words that refuse to stand still. There’s a readiness for forward motion built into these songs, although exiting the murk of everyday existence might be a little more challenging. As Albarn puts it on closer “The Heights”: “Seeing through the coma in our lives / Something so bright out there you can’t even see it”.

The lo-fi guitar and jaunty angles of “St. Charles Square” place it in the tradition of Blur knees-ups of the past, but it’s no less invigorating for that. Albarn is in fine form, bending your ear in the pub: “I fucked up / I’m not the first to do it” – the matter of fact delivery belying the sentiments laid bare elsewhere on the album. Then there’s “The Narcissist”, a mesmerising Proustian rush of a song. Despite arriving out of the blue crackling with electricity, it feels as if it has always been there, for you. The abstract wordplay acts as an oddly direct emotional gauge and here Blur go straight for the heart and the intellect. Coxon’s mirroring of phrases is particularly affecting, further grounding Albarn’s observations so that they aren’t misconstrued as flights of fancy:

I saw the solstice / The service station on the road / I took the acid / Under the white horses / My heart it quickened / I could not tear myself away / Became addiction / If you see darkness look away

A classic case of innocence vs experience then, Albarn unable to heed his own advice until he has lived it. Getting the band back together for The Ballad of Darren might even have saved him from himself, delighting us in the process. It is, in the end, an unexpected but most welcome gift from a band who have nothing left to prove, yet keep doing so nonetheless.

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