New York Darren and a story of Big L

IE what I got up to this week and a review of the new Blur album

After a first week of newslettering (newsletterage??) in which I had a (relative) load of fresh work published, this week I have been in New York, which has rather occupied my time and means that I now have to actually produce something to justify my appearance in your inboxes rather than just coasting on existing work. And so, below, I have reviewed the new Blur album, which is a real heart-string tugger. (And it’s not out until late July! So this is kind of, almost but not really an exclusive for you.)

My New York music discoveries, meanwhile, amount to one (sadly long departed) Golden Age rapper - Big L - and one intriguing Catalan / Balearic / Valencian trio - Marala - who tie into this whole new traditional / non traditional musical mixture that I keep going on about (see also: Tarta Relena, whose Fiat Lux album I once reviewed for Pitchfork; Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagés, Júlia Colom, who I interviewed at Primavera Sound 2023; Rosalía etc and so on.)

Big L, who I had definitely heard of before coming to New York, if little more, appeared on my radar for the rather leftfield reason that the apartment where we stayed was right next to a mural to the Harlem rapper (see picture); obviously, we trooped down to take pictures of it one day, only to be embarrassed when some local fans asked us if we knew Big L and I had to admit I only really knew his name. Still, they seemed happy enough and welcomed us to Harlem. (And this isn’t a travel newsletter, obviously, but I would definitely recommend Harlem as a place to stay.) Anyway, I have since investigated and I am surprised I never listened to Big L before as he combined the classic New York, Boom Bap production that I love (all Buckwild and Lord Finesse) with amazingly dextrous vocal style, heavy on multi-syllabic rhymes and metaphor. Put It On, his 1994 single, goes on the playlist.

Marala, meanwhile, were playing the Catalan Sounds on Tour event in Central Park, which a Radio Primavera Sound team were supporting. (We recorded a podcast at the event, which you will be able to hear soon.) Also on the bill were Queralt Lahoz, Lia Kali and DJ Trapella. But, for me, Marala stole the show with their close harmony singing, brilliant stage setting and adventurous fusion of music from the Països Catalans (the regions where Catalan is spoken: largely Catalonia, the Balearic Island and Valencia) with heavy percussion, electronic squirts and brash guitar, a little Tarta Relena in theory, but without really sounding like them. Their latest single, El Desich, which is a brilliant introduction to their work, goes on the playlist too.

(Incidentally, is someone going to come up with a name for this traditional / modern musical fusion that is going on in Spain right now? It definitely feels like something is happening, post Rosalía. And the way a lot of these acts work with each other makes you feel like there might be some kind of scene. But is that too crude a way of looking at things? Am I trying to coral things together that should never go? I don’t know.)

Keep your confidence, man

As for other stuff I’ve done: the interview that Mar Vallverdú and I conducted with the ever-charming Confidence Man at Primavera Barcelona is now on YouTube. They really are a shining example of how to be a great pop act and incredibly warm and friendly people. So more power to them.

The playlist

As ever, my playlist of NEW THINGS (plus, erm, a 1994 Big L song) is available here.

Blur - The Ballad of Darren

The Ballad of Darren, Blur’s ninth studio album, arrived with the surprise factor of a lightly-coloured greyhound racing out of fog. Sure, the veteran indie band had arranged a series of live dates - not, as Damon Albarn would sternly tell me, when I interviewed him and Graham in Madrid, reunion dates - for summer 2023. But no one was really expecting it when the single The Narcissist dropped in May, with the promise of a new album on the way. 

It’s not like we thought Blur couldn’t make another studio album. 2023 had already seen the release of new music from three quarters of the band, with a Gorillaz album joined by Dave Rowntree’s solo debut and Graham Coxon’s excellent The WAEVE collaboration with Rose Elinor Dougall. It just seemed unlikely that they would want to. The band’s last studio album, 2015’s The Magic Whip, had been cobbled together by Coxon from studio sessions the band recorded in Hong Kong after a festival they were playing got canceled. And at times it sounded a bit like that: cobbled and scratched together, interesting but not entirely satisfying. (Even if Lonesome Street, the album’s opening song, was classic Blur.) 

The other question was why would they want to? Albarn in particular has so many projects on the go, from Gorillaz to solo work, where his is the musical prerogative; so why would he want to go back to a band, with its deep-grounded circles of influence and possibility of compromise?

Listen to The Ballad of Darren, though, and it seems ridiculous that this could be anything other than a Blur record. It sounds like a record that had to exist, which is high praise indeed for a band’s ninth album. The simple reason for this is that The Ballad of Darren isn’t just an album by Blur - it’s an album about Blur, a reflection of the band - and in particular Damon Albarn’s - aging glory.

In a press release, Albarn called the album “an aftershock record, reflection and comment on where we find ourselves now” and you can hear this in the album’s lyrics. The Narcissist appears to be about the experience of being in Blur in the 21st Century - “Looked in the mirror / So many people standing there / I walked towards them / Into the floodlights / I heard no echo / There was distortion everywhere”. (Or, perhaps, the experience of being a mature rock star in the 21st Century, which for Damon Albarn basically equates to the same thing.)

Elsewhere, Damon opens St Charles Square - a song that currently serves as the band’s concert opener - with the flat assertion: “I’ve f*cked up. I’m not the first to do it.”; The Ballad, the elegiac, piano-driven album opener, features the line “I just looked at my life”; and Barbaric, which reminds me of Madness’ more wistful moments, finds Damon reflecting, “I have lost the feeling that I thought I would never lose.” The feeling is of hearts on sleeve, the wisdom of aging and the inevitable losses that come with time.

How younger fans will react to this, isn’t clear. But for fans of my age, 45, who grew up with Blur’s Britpop glory years - and Parklife hit when I was sweet sixteen - this is a glorious development, a showcase of the mournful, self-reflective melody that Damon does better than perhaps any other songwriter of his generation, wrapped up in his little-pop-star-lost vocal heart pull. 

Goodbye Albert, with its slow, electric throb and beatific chord changes, is one of the band’s best song, capable of reducing a grown man - i.e. me - to sniffles on a packed Madrid train, as the wifi floated in and out of usefulness. In this, perhaps, the Blur album that The Ballad of Darren most resembles is 13, the moment in 1999 when all the certainty of youth and the brazenness of stardom was starting to flake around the edges, bringing some of the band’s most emotional moments, such as Tender and Coffee and TV.

Not that The Ballad of Darren is the Damon Albarn show. Graham Coxon’s guitar playing is incendiary on St Charles Square and The Heights, which ends the album on a narcotic rush of noise. Alex James is, as ever, a flexible and highly melodic bass player, while Rowntree is reliably solid as the band dip into waltz time on Far Away Island - the one song on this album you could imagine Gorillaz taking a stab at.

The Ballad of Darren, then, is a far better album than we could have expected from Blur, now well into their fourth decade of existence. It’s a moving, mournful record, unsure of its place in the world but determined to keep pulling on ahead regardless; an advert for second, third and even fourth chances. And if that idea doesn’t resonate, then frankly I envy you.

Further investigation

I reviewed The WAEVE album for Pitchfork. 

And I interviewed Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall for Radio Primavera Sound.

Some more new music

Is it really 20 years since the release of Dizzee Rascal’s gob-stopping debut album Boy In Da Corner? Apparently so, which makes me feel very old indeed. Dizzee’s first releases - and indeed early grime in general - take me back to my first few years in London, being brilliantly overwhelmed by this sonically deviant UKG offshoot. And Boy In Da Corner - as well as those early Wiley singles - was a massive, skulking highlight that gave the UK a genuine shock when it won the Mercury Music Prize in 2003, back when these things mattered. Dizzee’s career since has been sketchy - and depressingly, there’s also this - but Streetfighter, originally released on a white label in the early 2000s, now getting a widespread release as part of 20th anniversary plans for Boy In Da Corner, has everything that was great about Dizzee - razor sharp beats, which balance melodic sweetness with rhythmical grit, and his urgent, cocky but pained flow.

I don’t really know who Shouse are (research tells me they are “an Australian-New Zealand electronic music duo consisting of Jack Madin and Ed Service” and, quite frankly, I suspect I wouldn’t really like them on their own). But they have teamed up with the ever euphoric, always brilliant, House Gospel Choir on Your Love, a summer spectacular of a song that is ALL ABOUT the vocal. (The production, to be honest, is a bit plastic.) Your Love  reminds me of both Abba and Joe Smooth, which is a potent combination. And I would love to link to it but the song isn’t out until Friday.

Goldie’s Timeless (The Remixes) is stunning. You will probably know the classic remixes from 4 Hero, Peshay and Doc Scott from back in the proverbial day but newer producers like Break, J Kenzo and (especially) Searchlight, do a brilliant job on the disc of fresh reworks, which is very much one in the eye of people who think that jungle died in 1997. You can hear the Break remix of Inner City Life here. 

Pangaea’s new album, Changing Channels, is quietly massive and absolutely packed with hooks, in a way that makes you wonder why more producers don’t do this. But you probably already knew that from the singles….

Things other people made

I’m not the biggest fan of Elliot Smith so I didn’t read Jayson Greene’s Pitchfork article about his High School band when published in March. But I did listen to the podcast Pitchfork recently made exploring the article’s discoveries and it was fascinating. Imagine if your favourite artist had a teenage prog rock band who made six albums that included embryonic versions of some of that artist’s best-known songs; and imagine if it turned out these songs were actually co-writes, rather than your artist originals, and how that would make you re-assess the lyrical content of those songs and what the songs might mean. That’s a lot of realisation. Now can someone please dig up Benny Andersson’s teenage tapes? Thank you.