Music Review: Blur, ?Parklive? (EMI/Parlophone) | StaticBlog

on August 29, 2012M at 9:34 am

Rating: 93

Blur is either shoring up its legacy to strengthen the band?s next chapter or capping it off for posterity ? Damon Albarn?s assessment of the reunited group?s life expectancy seems to change daily. Whether Blur has no distance left to run or has hope for tomorrow, the raucously remarkable ?Parklive,? released days after the group?s massive concert in London?s Hyde Park at the close of the Summer Olympic Games, makes the case that the love affair between Blur and its British fans is reaching fever pitch.

For such a quick turnaround, ?Parklive? sounds crisp and expertly mastered, but the short time between concert and marketplace also kept the band or any other powers that be from fussing over it. This is, after all, a document of how about 100,000 people bonded with Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree, and throughout ?Parklive,? they all come on like the biggest hooligan backup choir on record. As Coxon begins playing the signature guitar line from ?Tender,? the audience immediately starts singing the ?Oh my baby? refrain, and on several tracks, including ?Country House,? the crowd seems to be fighting Albarn for lead vocal duties.

Just before this performance, EMI/Parlophone released ?Blur 21,? an expansive career retrospective that included nearly every note the band recorded, from 1991?s ?She?s So High? through last month?s ?Under the Westway.? It also contained two concert DVDs, and yet there is no question that ?Parklive? is Blur?s definitive concert document. The proof takes place when Phil Daniels, who played Jimmy the Mod in ?Quadrophenia,? reprises his role as narrator on 1994?s ?Parklife,? barking out his lines and whipping the audience into what sounds like a football riot. That intensity never relents in the set, replicated in the rabid reception for ?Song 2,? ?End of the Century,? ?For Tomorrow? and the majestic closer, ?The Universal.? Like the past bands they admired or the contemporaries who they fought for Brit-pop supremacy, Blur deals with the kind of internal struggles that could send them into permanent past tense at any moment, hence Albarn?s waffling over the band?s future. But ?Parklive? is proof that Britain and much of the rest of the world needs them around long after the London games recede into history.

? Lang

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