13

FOR A band capable of composing such cockle-warming ballads as 'The Universal' and 'To The End', there's always been something innately stand-offish about Blur. At worst, this quality manifested itself in the smug observations of British Lotto culture that made up the bulk of 1995's The Great Escape, a work largely flawed by champagne-fatigue and a lack of compassion for its subjects.

However, it's also this very sense of contrivance and calculation (words often used as sticks to beat the band with, when they're not necessarily bad qualities at all) which propelled the quartet off a bandwagon of their own design three years ago, when they switched allegiances from Ray Davies and The Specials to Pavement and Beck, resulting in the post-grunge artfuck that was Blur.

That's the record which should've been entitled The Great Escape, given that it allowed its creators to shake off the manacles of an English pop heritage that had become co-opted by all manner of second-rate copycats with Steve Marriot haircuts.

On that album, and most especially the subsequent tour, guitarist Graham Coxon emerged as a major player in the Blur gameplan, his cracked noisenik experiments on tunes like 'MOR' and 'Song 2' pushing Damon Albarn off his smug social commentator perch and into the gutter with the rest of the doubting bozo poets. But then, having successfully bailed out of the B**tpop boat as it bellied up, where to steer the dingy, cap'n?

Well, it's one of this group's strengths that they've never been precious (or original) enough to cling to any one manifesto for too long. Like Bowie, Blur excel at playing artful dodgers, picking all the pockets in the pop marketplace and counting up the spoils come mixdown time. Therefore, stylistically, 13 is all over the shop, wilfully willy-nilly, but also a quantum jump. Blur Go Spacerock might be a glib description of what's going on here, but it's not far off the mark.

So, the lead-off single and opening track 'Tender' is a song of unambivalent empathy that also nicks Jason Pierce's best trick, marrying narcoleptic ennui to a full-bodied gospel chorus and Plastic Ono Band rhythm track (and it's worth noting that Blur are just as guilty of Beatles kleptomania as Noel Gallagher; it's just that, like all the smartest coggers, they've taken care to disguise their sources).

In the first 20 minutes, we get the band trying on every hat in the store, beginning with the sci-fi white-noise of 'Bugman', where Damon adopts some supervillain counterfoil to Bono's Fly and wails a snatch of Sun Ra's 'Space Is The Place' as he's consumed by some of the most disconcerting distortion ever committed to tape (arise, Sir Coxon). Then, the slackerisms of 'Coffee ... TV' capsize into the somniferous plod of 'Swamp Song', a freakfest wherein the vocalist gets to try on Lux Interior's tightest fishnets and squeal like a pig.

If you want handy reference points, tough titty - there aren't any, except maybe some nonsensical mix-up of early Roxy Music, Cornelius, Neu and Bowie in Berlin. Here, at the album's centre, '1992', 'Battle', and 'Mellow Song' open up a sort of weird vortex where form spectacularly yields to content. Yet somehow, as they float ever deeper into the flux, Blur become more of a rock 'n' roll band, evoking Spiritualized and even Primal Scream, an inkling confirmed by Albarn singing "I lost my girl to the Rolling Stones" in a Beck-like slur over the Air-locked tones of 'Trailer Park'.

Then, almost bookending 67 minutes of arrhythmia, the hallelujah waltz of 'No Distance Left To Run' contains probably the most naked verse Albarn's ever written, an emptied-out admission that the thrill is gone ("When you see me/Please turn your back and walk away/I don't wanna see you 'cos I know the dreams that you keep"). Peeping Toms hoping for an inside angle on whatever happened to him and Justine will be sated, but they'll also miss the point - this is as solemn and shattered as it gets.

And ultimately, while certain sub-sections of the band's fanbase might greet 13 with the same fear and trepidation felt by the big-browed bipeds beholding the oblong apparition in the late Stanley Kubrick's 2001 - A Space Odyssey, this is the work by which the broken and bruised will best remember Blur.