Your ears are full but you're empty

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

28/03/99 : 13 - Blur

Our third visit with the lads and given there are 27 years between the two previous visits, they are somewhat different - and this sits somewhere in the middle, so who knows what we'll get.  For me, this falls into a dead period for the band - I kinda gave up on them after their eponymous album, which was (quite obviously) their fifth album (in other news, The Mars Volta's eponymous album was their seventh and Slowdive's effort was 26 years after their debut - these are the latest efforts I can find but I reckon there must be later ones).  But, with the benefit of advancing years, I'm quite interested to listen to this and suspect I might actually like it - but we never owned it (18/40).

Hmmm - I quite like "Tender" but it's not exactly a banging track to open an album is it?  And it's followed up by "Bugman" which is, well, just a bit shit?!?  And then they pull out "Coffee And TV" which is exactly the sort of thing I think they should have been doing at this point.  And then "Swamp Song" is shit - and so it continues throughout the album with consistency being a big issue for me.  I also have an issue with song length, there are six tracks over five minutes here, with three of them being over seven minutes.  Why would you do that?  There are some nice enough sounds in plenty of the songs, but some musical pruning pretty much across the entire patch definitely wouldn't have gone amiss.  Overall, I admire their ambition but am a bit disappointed in the execution.

We're at #1 in the charts this week on their second week of a 28 week run, having debuted at #1.  The rest of the top five were The Corrs, Stereophonics, Robbie Williams and The Corrs with the highest new entry being Vengaboys (#15), closely followed by Skunk Anansie (#16) which is slightly different musical fare.

Wikipedia has quite a lot of text on the album, but all it really says is that 13 represents the letter "B" in Blur, William Orbit took over production from Stephen Street and relationships were strained all round, driven by the breakdown of Damon Albarn's relationship with Justine Frischmann.  The critics mostly liked it (although some complained about the lack of consistency) but they were worried that the change in style wouldn't be successful, but what do they know, eh?!?  As well as #1 here, it also hit the top in Norway and Ireland, made the top twenty in a load of European countries and even got as high as #80 in the US (although there's a very plausible suggestion a lot of that was down to the cute video for "Coffee And TV").

"Customers also listened to" Supergrass, Suede, Pulp and Kula Shaker - all definitely in the same ballpark there.  This just feels a bit too "kitchen-sinky" for me - an accusation I have thrown at both Damon and Gorillaz before, so I think I know where I put the blame for this.

04/04/99 - Surprisingly tolerable
21/03/99 - Another disappointment