Early on in
The Ballad of Darren, the unexpected and understated
Blur reunion album,
Damon Albarn sings "We have lost the feeling that we thought we'd never lose," a line that could easily be interpreted as the vocalist addressing his bandmates.
Blur lost an intangible feeling during an acrimonious split in the early 2000s, the band limping forward after the departure of guitarist
Graham Coxon during the sessions for
Think Tank. Within a few years, the group tended to their lingering wounds, healing enough to play the occasional reunion concert, a union that eventually led to
The Magic Whip, a happy accident of an album.
The Ballad of Darren is something entirely different. Where
Coxon crafted
The Magic Whip from studio jams the band left behind after a week exiled in Hong Kong,
Blur recorded
The Ballad of Darren as a unit within the studio, shaping and coloring compositions
Albarn wrote while on tour with
Gorillaz in 2022. It's how
Blur made records back in the '90s but, notably, the group replaced their mainstay
Stephen Street with
James Ford, a producer who has worked with
Arctic Monkeys and
Florence and the Machine, not to mention
Gorillaz.
Ford teases out the louche, loungey aspects of
Albarn's songs, lending a lushness to the melancholy undercurrents that flow through
The Ballad of Darren. Apart from "St. Charles Square," which announces itself with a flurry of guitar skronk and profanity, there's no direct evocation of
Blur's younger days; far from conjuring the ghost of the melodramatic "To the End," the hints of hi-fi sophistication lend weary texture to melodies that sigh and linger.
Albarn spends the album pondering severed connections and vanished spaces, sentiments that could be read either as mourning a personal loss or as a meditation on a post-pandemic world, yet
The Ballad of Darren doesn't feel precisely sad, not in the way
Damon's solo albums often can.
Blur gives
Albarn's songs depth and dimension, as
Graham Coxon decorates the margins left by the elastic rhythms of
Alex James and
Dave Rowntree.
The Magic Whip hinted at the essence of this chemistry but
The Ballad of Darren revels in it, resulting in an album that feels age-appropriate without being stodgy: it's mature and nuanced, cherishing the connections that once were taken for granted but now seem precious. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine