BLUR
A: Bang
B: Luminous
(Food 1991)
Do I really need to explain who Blur are? Giants of the Britpop scene, and perennial rivals to Oasis; although I suspect that much of that nonsense from the creation of that genre to the rivalry stories comes as much from the minds of desperate music journalists as does from reality. I imagine that most of the people involved just wanted to try and make the best music that they could.
This is before those megastar days though, they'd just had a little bit of success, and were trying to follow that up, however this record was not to be that, they'd have to wait a few more years before truly exploding on the scene!
Before Brtipop there was the 'Baggy/Madchester' scene, (another convenient box to drop similar sounding stuff into!), and Bang surfs along the dying waves of that sound, and could easily fit in with records by such acts as The Farm (reviewed here), Northside or My Jealous God (both to be reviewed at a later date should I ever get round to it...). Bang has that slightly funky beat with groovy guitars, that sounds very similar to a lot of other records at the time, including previous Blur records! There's nothing particularly bad or poor about it, nether is there anything particularly noteworthy or idiosyncratically Blur about it. You can only tell it's Blur because of Damon's very recognisable voice; even there there's very little energy or enthusiasm to his signing. It feels like it was released because the record company wanted something that would fit in with what else was going on at the time. Apparently the band don't particularly like it, and seem to feel very much the same way about it.
At least the intro on the flipside, Luminous, grabs the attention by being something different starting with a cymbal heavy percussion section for about 20 seconds before the guitars kick in. This has a slightly dreamy blissed-out feeling which is helped by the slightly psychedelic sounds emanating from bass and guitar. Yes, it does feel that the inspiration for this comes more from the late 60's than form more contemporary sounds, whilst still feeling modern (well 1991 modern!). It's laid back and very atmospheric, and crucially shows that there's more to Blur than the aside would show.
So an interesting side-track to the early days of a major recording artist - one where the record company, in an effort to catch the zeitgeist actually have stifled the true creativity of the band. There is little in Bang to take notice of - it's there and not unpleasant, but not memorable, it's another record where the b-side shows the true measure of the band and hints that they have much more interesting stuff within them.
Next time something blonde...
