Bummer.
After not being anything remotely close to a Damon Albarn fan for decades, indeed, I slipped out of his solo gig last year in a sense of dislocation and emotional hibernation… meaning, I couldn’t stand him or his lousy robots, I fell for “Go Out”, the first new Blur song in also a long long time, 12 years. Perhaps not great but that “loco-ohoh-oh” hooked me hard and I was ready to embrace my inner football hooligan. Yes, it was a half plod moody track but it was addictive.
Well, that didn’t last long.
“Too Many Of Us” suggests Blur are taking the oh no Hong Kong concept of smaller everything to logical extremes with this ode to over population, though, heaven knows, the West has done its parts to keep down the population over the past fifty years. So why is this brick lecturing us, on the awful song?
After a boring and yet still overblown intro Albarn intones “There are too many of us, its plain to see.” Well, it is certainly plain. I hate Blur like this, slow, world weary this is a lowing without the slightest semblance of melody. If Blur have any opinion about population expansion, certainly one of the least thrilling problems facing the planet, I mean, besides that it is on their minds, I have no clue what it is.
You can forgive bands fuzzy concepts if the songs are good enough. This one is terrible, and if the rest of the album is half as bad they’ve got a serious problem. Perhaps it would help the problem of too many people if they went and fucked themselves, thereby decreasing the surplus population.
Grade: D+
blur – Trouble in the Message Centre – encore at secret gig London 20 March 2015 from Richard Linton on Vimeo.