Thirty five years ago, while Mick and Keef injected the final doses of Jack and junk into Beggars Banquet out in Los Angeles, Brian Jones sucked a deep hit of kif and hopped a cab down the coast from Tangier to Larache with engineer George Chkiantz and girlfriend Suki in tow. From Larache the group hiked halfway up a mountain to the village of Jajouka, where for ages masses of drummers pounded under a chorus of reed ripping rhaita players as part of the Bou Jeloud ritual dance. Jones dreamed of expanding the Stones' sound beyond their American roots influence. Easily bored, he'd already exhausted sitar, vibraphone, dulcimer, and "the bloody marimbas" (as Keith called them) two years earlier on Aftermath.
As Jones' health famously sagged along with the bags under his eyes, The Rolling Stones found less and less use for his experiments. "Moroccan drums" pop up on "Midnight Rambler", but the band would never hike that mountain for the elusive Jajouka fusion. That is, not until they mattered little, in the late 80s, for "Continental Drift", a cut hidden deep in the career nadir of Steel Wheels. By then, looking to Africa for a muse had become AOR cliche, thanks to Paul Simon and Sting. Even the derided Paul McCartney overcame bubblegum balladry for Band on the Run, recorded in Lagos amidst studio shortcomings and legendary knife-point muggings.
Which brings us to Blur and their long-developed Think Tank, recorded in Morocco without founding guitar icon Graham Coxon. Rock 'n' roll precedent begs certain questions. Will the loss of Coxon equate to the loss of Brian Jones (or Mick Taylor) or a hypothetical loss of Keith Richards? Will Think Tank be another Cut the Crap, The Final Cut, Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde, Carl and the Passions (So Tough), Good Stuff, And Then There Were Three, Wake of the Flood, Mag Earwig, Stranded, One Hot Minute, Face Dances, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, Other Voices, Squeeze, Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age, Ultra, Drama, Slow Buildings, Road Hawks, Now and Them, or Chinese Democracy? Or more along the lines of Sticky Fingers, Back in Black, XTRMNTR, Adore, Up, In the Studio, Movement, Everything Must Go, Soft Bulletin, Power, Corruption & Lies, First Step, Damaged, Green Mind, This Is Hardcore, Coming Up, Full House, and ...And Justice for All?
With the exception of a year back in 1995, Blur have never rested on their laurels. Unlike their peers, they've delivered each album dipped in a drastic new element while keeping a consistent melodic heart. Albarn has always taken his shots, and thirteen years on seems to savor the challenge. Take, for instance, 2002's Mali Music, his rich, ethereal solo equivalent to Brian Jones' The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka: not content to simply document the musical heritage of the locals, Albarn stepped in alongside Afel Bocoum, protegé to Ali Farka Toure, humming his melodica during Niger-side jams and later reassembling the results in London as a montage of British-pop sensibilities with post-production special effects and punches of guitar, bass, and keyboard. The ambience and dust of the Malian excursion settles heavily over Think Tank, and notably, Albarn seems to have picked up more guitar skills from Bocoum than Coxon. The majestic, snaking "Out of Time" relies less on the lugubrious, Gibraltar-docked solo than the vast, four-dimensional environment surrounding it. One gets the sense that even if Graham Coxon had caught the flight to Marrakesh, Think Tank wouldn't have turned out much different.
Of course, all this focus on Damon and Graham discredits Alex James and Dave Rowntree, who really push Think Tank through the sand. The two both preempted the critics by perfectly describing the new music in interviews. James claimed Think Tank "has hips," while Rowntree simply said it's most similar to Parklife. James goes the furthest in giving Blur hips, beyond often posing with his protruding-- with the focus off Coxon, his brilliant bass playing will finally be seen as the vital element in Blur. It gave "Girls and Boys", "Parklife", "Coffee and TV", and "Song 2" their major hooks, while Graham hammered away on minimal riffs. If you're air-playing anything along to those tracks, it's the air-bass you're wriggling your index and middle fingers to. Likewise, Think Tank is laden with creative bass leads.
"Brothers and Sisters" pounds along like contemporary Primal Scream revisiting Screamadelica. While Damon twists away like the Konda Bongo Man on guitar and hammers "Rockit" Hancock keyboard blurts, James freaks out like a Funkadelic foray into post-punk on "Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club". Rowntree, meanwhile, switches between locking the beats into motorik molds or loosens them up into Bou Jeloud punk. But Think Tank is by no means "Blur gone dance" (ironically, the two Fatboy Slim songs, "Crazy Beat" and "Gene by Gene", are, if anything, Clash-inspired)-- what was "Girls and Boys" but a disco rock track seven years before it was fashionable? Even "Battle", "People in Europe", "Death of a Party", "I'm Just a Killer for Your Love", "Entertain Me", "On Your Own", and "London Loves" used loops or drum machines.
Incidentally, despite my earlier, tenuous attempts to link Blur to the Stones in some sort of sacred, afro-spiritual rock history, Blur worship more at the altar of Bowie. The Bowie element has, of course, always been there, from "Bugman" to "M.O.R."-- the latter emulated Lodger's "Boys Keep Swinging" to such an extent that Bowie was given songwriting credit. Here it seems that Albarn must idolize Lodger, in particular, as Think Tank follows the overlooked album closely in spirit. In "Fantastic Voyage", "African Night Flight", and "Yassassin", Bowie found a fractured, minimal sound affected by Middle Eastern and African music without blindly throwing a robe and bongo on while inviting Ladysmith Black Mambazo to sing. In contrast "DJ" and "Boys Keep Swinging" offered jittery, pre-new wave dance-rock.
Combat Rock, too, stands as an obvious parallel. "Car Jamming", "Straight to Hell", and "Overpowered by Funk" inspire the most daring Think Tank tracks-- "Me, White Noise" (with Phil Daniels standing in for Ginsberg), "Jets", and "Ambulance". But, ah, remember Dave Rowntree saying this was like Parklife. In basic sound, as you may have gathered, no. Parklife was the defining BRITISH album of the 90s, ushering in an unintentional wave of newly patriotic blokes who failed to see it as satire, like "Born in the U.S.A." blaring at Reagan rallies. Likewise, Think Tank sounds like Britain today-- a Britain where Panjabi MC's "Mundian to Bach Ke" and Audio Bully's "We Don't Care" outchart Athlete's modernized Britpop. It sounds like Notting Hill, where American media-skewed preconceptions are both confirmed by the enormous white townhomes and shattered by the multi-ethnic markets. Damon Albarn is more likely to find bootleg dancehall CDs spread across a Pakistani carpet outside his Honest Jon's Records shop than Heathen Chemistry.
Then again, Think Tank does sound like Parklife, as it contains Albarn's best ballads since. "Sweet Song" plucks an echoing piano and rusty guitar under a lake of pure, clear melody, and "Caravan" cracks like a last lament transmitted from an imploding submarine on crunchy sonar pulses and disintegrating guitar from a deep P.A. as Albarn announces, "You'll feel the weight of it," before breaking the surface in dulcimer-drenched sunshine. Oh, and Graham does pop up once, on "Battery in Your Leg", which opens sounding eerily similar to Eno and Bowie's Berlin output before Coxon makes his guitar twang like high tension wires snapping and erupts in Saturn-rocket blasts.
Like being plopped down in Morocco for the first time, or Covent Garden for that matter, Think Tank takes some reorienting. To answer the questions posed earlier, the album is laughably miles better than every album on the first list, and surprisingly better than, or just as good as, every single one on the other. But don't just judge it as an album by a band coming off a major line-up change. You won't need to.
