While the notion of slaving away all year for six miserable holidays clearly doesn’t sit right with Albarn, he finds humor in the situation-perhaps even joy. “Bank Holiday”: Blur goes into punk mode for another look at monotony and workaday living. Again, the topics couldn’t be more commonplace-morning traffic jams, feeding the pigeons in the park-but the band makes them pop.
It’s perfect, then, that actor Phil Daniels, star of the “Quadrophenia” movie, handles the slang-heavy spoken-word guest vocal. “Parklife”: Way before Blur waxed philosophic about what it means to be a disgruntled young Londoner, the Who tackled the question with “Quadrophenia,” their finest album. “End of a Century”: Another vivid rocker about the drabness everyday life, “End of the Century” is about waking up in a bug-infested flat, putting on the same clothes all your mates are wearing, and shuffling through a life that’s “nothing special.” At least there’s soft-core porn to look forward to on the telly. “Tracy Jacks”: Albarn is very much a disciple of Ray Davies, and here, he imagines the Kinks’ “Well Respected Man” at the end of his tether, disrobing at the beach and getting busted by the bobbies. If they were aiming for mockery, they have plenty of fun in spite of themselves. “Girls & Boys”: Is that an arched eyebrow Albarn is casting toward decadent club culture? Who can tell? He and the band are rocking dark shades and grooving away like bombed Ibiza kids on this sexy gender-bending disco jam. For what it’s worth, Albarn indicated last July that he’d begin working on new Blur material once his solo album dropped, and that day as already arrived.īut even if Blur never records again, ‘Parklife’ remains a masterpiece that continues to offer cheeky little surprises in its nooks and crannies. Whether the band will record new music again is still anyone’s guess. In 2012, the group reunited after several years away and headlined 2013’s Coachella Festival. But while ‘Parklife’ didn’t necessarily move the American masses, it was a modest underground sensation - the infectious lead single “Girls & Boys” went to no.
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