Word: blur
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...difference between these bands’ ties to pop-culture history is fundamental to their difference as a band: whereas Oasis were plodding, incomprehensible lyrically but musically well-trained in writing hook-heavy guitar rock, Blur took a step back and refused to take on the high-mindedness that Oasis never quite seem able to convincingly pull...
Look only to the album art of the seminal troika of Modern Life is Rubbish, The Great Escape, and Parklife, the band’s finest hour: we see the yellow Blur logo, curvy and European-looking, cast onto three different images: on Rubbish, a vintage propaganda drawing of a speeding train, on Parklife, a close-up of a speeding racetrack greyhound, on Escape, two friends on a boat and the legs of one jutting out in a hyperrealized image...
Inside these albums were track after track of character sketches with discontented characters who ought to be living the good life, and we get the impression that Blur picks onto something that is uniquely British: they seize onto the working-class provincial traditions of the Kinks and Who, the story-telling that is capable in these forms...
DREW: First off, your cover-art argument is absurd—I don’t understand what importance you’re ascribing to those images, and Oasis used a cheeky Euro-looking logo more effectively than Blur ever did. Moreover, there’s the issue of whether or not cover art really means a damn thing, especially nowadays when a cover is expected to be bizarre and/or “artsy...
...effect, even when heavy-handed, is glorious. With the Blur albums, there’s just too much a sense that the band members are all winking at each other from opposite sides of the studio. What tries to be charming and humorous ends up coming across as (to use the local vernacular) snarky...