http://www.dotmusic.com/reviews/Albums/April2003/reviews29200.asp It's hard to come to a new Blur album without any baggage whatsoever but 'Think Tank' is an album so focussed on music and the pleasure of music that it requires the personalities standing behind it be put on one side. Few bands have so frequently been victim of our need to find the story behind the sounds they make and the words they sing as Blur. Few have become so sullen and withdrawn as a consequence. As we've watched they've twisted and turned their way in and out of musical favour. 'Think Tank' arrives at a time when rock's margins have been desperately narrowed by the glorification of its most crude and urgent forms, yet it's an album that's perfectly out of time. As other established acts with roots reaching beyond the current required reference points stumble, Blur seem gloriously above it all. Perhaps it's another sign of Albarn's sheer bloody-minded self-belief; perhaps it's all this unfashionable (anti-fashion?) tampering with 'World Music'. The album implores us to not even bother trying to answer the question. As deftly as he has switched his presentation for each project, each album, Albarn now switches musical styles and influences. It's a trait that's often marked him out in the eyes of the media as a kind of musical man of many faces, not to be trusted. But, there's no more spurious a concept in music than 'authenticity' and no greater enemy of invention. The freedom of invention brings with it a drawback: a hit and miss ratio shared by all recent Albarn projects. Of all of them, 'Think Tank' is the most musically whole, its flaws more obviously the artistic compromises of a big, commercial band. Its triumphs, conversely, are wholly personal, perhaps because - since Graham Coxon's departure - the toughest compromise is no longer part of the equation. At the core of the record are a handful of songs on which melody is so exquisitely expressed through stripped, simple vocals and absolute purity of sound and emotion that all concerns about the ego/egos behind them become pointless. 'Caravan' plays on a simple resolution as the "la la las" surface fantastically from the muzzy lo-fi production: like the best song you ever heard your neighbour play bursting through your front door in time for the chorus. The title of the most personal, 'Sweet Song', implies the coolly detached construction of emotional effect, but it's at odds with the confessional tone of the lyrics. 'Out Of Time' is of the same genealogy and has already proved a gloriously un-compromised Top 5 single. The temptation is to see these as some of the most honest and direct songs that Damon Albarn has ever written. Each one is a frozen moment of human warmth, an experience of nature captured in sound, a timeless song. 'Battery In Your Leg' is a darker, more mournful proposition. Ravaged by Coxon's only contribution to the album, a chilling vortex of sound with steely, tumbling notes echoing at its centre. Elsewhere, the hit and miss ratio throws up the partially successful ('Brothers And Sisters', 'Jets'), some great pop songs ('Gene By Gene', 'Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club'), genuinely exciting experiments (hidden track 'My White Noise' and 'On The Way To The Club') and the commercially compromised (the cheap thrill of 'Crazy Beat'). Theory will rage on as to whose songs these are, fuelled by their immense personality, which is at odds with the perverse unwillingness of their apparent creative source to show us any of his own. What matters, though, is that Blur continue to shout "la, la, la, la" as all around try to tell them what they ought to be doing. They no longer give a shit what you think, there's nothing to be scared of. They've made a mature and, occasionally beautiful album, possibly the finest of their career. 9/10 James Poletti --

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