Sexta-feira 30 Nov 2007, 14h:03

10 years on: 10 essential albums of Britpop
FL.AG Magazine
June 2006

Blur: The Great Escape
by Sandra Croft

It's hard to truly understand Blur's ‘English Life’ trilogy without hearing all three albums. The Great Escape is that last piece of the puzzle which ties everything together and takes the band's formula of acid and hook-laden English character sketches to its logical conclusion. At the time of its release, the struggle between Blur and Oasis was in full force, but ten years on, there is no comparison between the latter's laddish monotone, and Blur's sharp musical intelligence. The record's dark, focused attack shows Damon Albarn to be one of the most intuitive songwriters of our modern era - after the Cockney charade of Parklife, this is a complete nightmare vision of Pynchon's model of information overload leading to entropy and inertia. Whereas Modern Life Is Rubbish was filled with poppy accounts of the British middle class seen through a mod's eyes, and Parklife displayed trashier stories of British city culture, The Great Escape is all about the hidden agendas of upper-class British suburbanites. Albarn sketches some memorable aural vignettes: take the sex-crazed couple in "Stereotypes" ("the neighbors may be staring/but they are just past caring") or the "naughty" businessman in "Mr. Robinson's Quango" who's wearing plaid French knickers and stockings under his suit.

If you are in your mid- to late-twenties now, there will be a special place in your heart for this record. The Great Escape was a periodical of our generation’s summer of love 1995 - when the shirts were loud, the music was everywhere, and we were drunk.
Blur