Revisit of the Week: Blur - Think Tank (2003)
Hot take 1: Think Tank is Blur's best album.
Again, it's Flint here with an affinity for a band just doing a weird-ass career derail of a record. During the sessions Blur had become a trio because guitarist Graham Coxon got fed up with the musical direction Albarn was pushing the band towards and clashed with Norman Cook (AKA Fatboy Slim) who was producing parts of the sessions, and decided to simply ditch the band (hot take 2: the only Coxon-featuring song here, "Battery on My Leg", is the album's weakest song and a lukewarm reheat of the previous album's stand-out "No Distance Left to Run"). This gave Albarn the impetus of driving Blur even further away from both the cheeky-chappy britpop they made their name with and the noisier alternative rock they'd reinvented themselves through in the albums prior. Fresh from his solo album Mali Music and Gorillaz' debut album a few years prior, Albarn nudged the rest of the band to adopt both more global influences and more club-heady influences. The places where Coxon's guitars would've been were replaced by layers and layers of percussion, multiple vocal harmonies, textural keyboards and other noise and clatter. The darkness that was already part of the album (its working title was "Darklife") took on a more melancholy shade in the wake of Coxon's departure, and all these incredibly groovy songs got companions from mournful, wistful ballads and atmospheric moments. Sometimes the two regions overlapped and you got something wild.
In my wild baby years of music nerdiness of the early 2000s, I mainly knew Blur through Parklife (1994) and had become intrigued by 13 (1999) though I couldn't quite grasp it in full at the time. Think Tank's release timed well during those early steps of music obsession and I approached it with an open mind and arms, and became entranced by it. Back in those days anything with a tight rhythm and a deep groove was bound to get me excited, and then you combined all that with the kind of deeply troubled, gray sadness that I had fallen in love with through the pre-millennium angst year rock albums that reinvented my music tastes? Absolutely ecstatic. Think Tank was a journey of an album where I could find something new each time, and piece by piece all its various bits began to make sense: the locked repetition and mania of "Jets", the eerily fun "Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club" and "Brothers and Sisters", the haunting "Caravan" and "On the Way to the Club"... It was Albarn taking the best bits of that incredibly uneven first album by Gorillaz and mixing it with the best of Blur's alternative rock years.
Hot take 3: "Ambulance" is Blur's best song. It opens the album with a clear manifesto: "I ain't got nothing to be scared of", which is also scrawled in big red letters across the album's fold-out booklet, symbolising this brave new life as a three-legged dog (to quote another band who lost a vital member and created their career-best album in the depressed aftermath). The drums crash, the crystalline keyboards shimmer, the guitars create a wall of sound that's a few steps away from going full shoegaze, and underneath it all is that deeply plowing bass and the incessant drum groove. What begins as a mantra that Albarn repeats to himself over and over in hopes he'll actually believe it, transforms into a release of pent-up emotion building into an evocative tower of ascending sound, breaks down into loose funk and then re-constructs itself again into something defiant and almost giddy. It's marvellous.
Think Tank is still Blur at their most inventive and wild, and a major reason why I have time for this deeply hit-and-miss band.
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