Album Review: Blur – The Magic Whip

London, Morrocco, West Africa, Hell, Plastic Beach, Congo, London (again), and now Hong Kong. Damon Albarn's globe-trotting take on pop music has brought him far beyond Britpop, to say the least. But as he travels across the globe and in and out of projects, the line between his personal and pretense has blurred. He spent most of the last decade masquerading as a group of cartoon monkeys, but since Blur, the band he'll always be the most associated with, reunited in 2009, his music has become increasingly revealing as he pursues his first love of theatre and lays more of his personal life out on the page. On The Magic Whip, the London stalwarts' first album with guitarist and co-leader Graham Coxon in 16 years, the tug between Albarn's heart and head is more palpable than ever. As he wades through the personal and political in the streets of Hong Kong, Albarn's lucid reflections on his disconnection from modern life, himself, and his briefly estranged co-pilot Coxon find him more determined than ever to paint a vivid, intricate picture of his singular musical mind.

Mostly written in 2013 during an impromptu studio session in Hong Kong and finished 18 months later in London, The Magic Whip doesn't feel the least bit spontaneous, rushed, or disconnected. It sounds like a Blur album that could've been made any time in the last 10 years, which is hardly a bad thing. Across the album's twelve tracks, Albarn and Coxon touch on sonic footprints from every previous Blur album, which makes The Magic Whip the only Blur album that could be accurately described as sounding like a quintessentially Blur album. Blur's catalog can be roughly divided into three categories – the Britpop era (from the 1992 single "Popscene" to the 1995 album The Great Escape), the experimental era (1997's Blur and 1999's 13), and the outliers (the band's unremarkable 1991 debut Leisure and their only album without Coxon, 2003's very good anyway Think Tank) – and although The Magic Whip clearly taps into each of those eras, the synthesis of those disparate works never comes off as reductive. This is in no small part because the band's performance chemistry, a crucial aspect of the band that has only been underlined in the last decade because of its absence on Albarn and Coxon's other musical endeavors. Listening to them bounce along through opener "Lonesome Street" and propel the synth-string-disco "There Are Too Many Of Us", drummer Dave Rowntree and bassist Alex James make a retroactive case to be the most interesting rhythm section in all of Britpop. Even more crucially, Coxon's signature art-damaged, punk-sharpened guitar playing returns with a crispness that rarely appears on his songwriting-focused solo albums. As for Albarn, he walks the line between third-person narration and first-person disclosure with less regard for segmenting the two than ever. (After all, with Albarn, the personal is always political and vice versa). Considering the sheer volume of time it has been since Blur sounded this in sync with each other – Blur, release 15 years ago, was the last album produced a non-splintered version of the group – and the disparity of their projects during the break, it's remarkable how vibrant the album sounds.

Blur albums draw heavily from their locations, and although Hong Kong was chosen by circumstance, it turns out to be the perfect setting for Coxon and Albarn's creative reunion. Far removed from their old English haunts, it's a city with over 7 million people contributing to one of the world's biggest economies while dealing with all of the social issues that living in such a place brings. In other words, it's the kind of setting Albarn has been repeatedly drawn to in his post-Blur career, and he's completely in his element while in Hong Kong. The aforementioned "There Are Too Many Of Us" is probably the only dance-worthy song about overpopulation, at least partially because Albarn is the only songwriter who would think that is a good idea. When he writes the titular "Ice Cream Man" as a provider of both frozen treats and political backbone, it's hard not to see it fitting into the hypothetical album that Blur would've made in 1997 if they had ignored Coxon's fixation on American experimental and lo-fi. The punky "I Broadcast" gives Albarn another chance to bark out his late night exploits in a manner that will inevitably sound riveting at the edge of a festival stage. The album has not one, but two ballads about feeling lost in a foreign city ("Pyongyang", "Thought I Was a Spaceman"), and two chant-ready anthems addressing companionship. On paper, all of these Albarnisms in one album may make The Magic Whip seem like borderline parody in how quintessentially Blur it is. And it would be, if the songs weren't so damn good. There isn't a single throwaway here, and even if these songs don't push the band's creative boundaries as much 13 or Modern Life Is Rubbish did, the songs' overall quality ensures that The Magic Whip isn't the first regressive album for anyone involved with the band in decades.

At the core of The Magic Whip is "My Terracotta Heart", Albarn and Coxon's telling of their reconciliation which serves as the album's emotional centerpiece. It's a very good song, although it doesn't reach the heights of the grand declarations of Albarn's more recent albums ("On Melancholy Hill", "Lonely Press Play"), and it dominates every conversation the band have had about the album, which is more appropriate than it sounds. When viewed as a whole, Blur's original run was about two wildly creative songwriters pushing and pulling each other as far as their artistic and personal relationship could go, and even though both Albarn and Coxon went on to do plenty of excellent work outside of Blur, they never conjured the same alchemy that fueled "Tender", "This Is A Low", "The Universal", "Caramel", "Coffee and TV", "Beetlebum", or any of the other inimitable tunes they made in the '90s. That's why the Blur albums where the band try (and fail) to sustain their personal relationships are just as fascinating as the ones where they work almost exclusively in painting vivid alternate universes. If Coxon had returned after Think Tank and The Magic Whip had come out in 2006, it would've been hailed as "a return to form." Instead, as the product of a messy reconciliation and an unexpected studio visit (following an earlier, ultimately aborted session, no less), it stands as the band's effort to rediscover all of the things that made them great fifteen years prior. And in that regard, it is a resounding success. It places Blur next to Sleater-Kinney, The Afghan Whigs, and My Bloody Valentine on the growing list of bands that recaptured their old magic and channeled it into something greater than a year's worth of reunion gigs. More than that, however, it poses the question of whether or not Blur can make another massive jump forward creatively. If Albarn and Coxon's musical history is any indicator and they choose to go for album number 9, it's going to be fascinating to watch regardless if they succeed or fail. They've got a series of massive gigs to take care of first, though, and The Magic Whip justifies every last one of them.