Blur Think Tank

Blur dissolved slowly so it follows that their reunion was protracted – a halting reconvening that produced understated singles and excellent concerts spread out over a period of six years. Finding a headlining appearance at Japan's Tokyo Rocks festival canceled in the summer of 2013, the band holed up in a Hong Kong studio for five days, producing several reels of jams they abandoned until guitarist Graham Coxon decided to shape them into songs with the assistance of producer Stephen Street, the collaborator behind their greatest albums of the '90s. It's an unwieldy history for The Magic Whip, a record that's casually confident and so assured in its attack it feels like a continuation, not a comeback.

This is a special 5-disc edition of Blur's live album Parklive. It consists of 4 CDs (presented in this distribution) and 1 DVD with a video recording of the concert (already on the tracker). CD 1 and CD 2 contain the actual concert, while CD 3 and CD 4 contain rare live recordings and a recording of the concert "Blur - Live At The 100 Club"

A special edition from Blur to celebrate the 21st anniversary of their first single. There are 21 discs in total. 7 studio albums extended and remastered. 4 discs with rare recordings of the group, some of which have never been seen before.

To open this oddball supergroup's debut, Paul Simonon hints at "Guns of Brixton," and when Tony Allen's flex rhythms come in, there's a shadow of Fela Kuti, too. Then Damon Albarn's slow grit of a voice enters–framed by Simon Tong's flecked guitar. And collectively, The Good, the Bad, & the Queen is quickly sui generis, adamantly different than anything you think you've heard. A band with this much power has at least two options: to cut loose raucously or to mute their overt power for a more covert, dub-inflected atmospheric potency. Smartly, Albarn and his crew opt for the half-light of elastic bass lines, the clouds between the parentheses of drums–the covert. It's not until "Kingdom of Doom," the erstwhile 'single' of the album, that motion expands beyond the languorous. And even then, Tony Allen largely sits out. You get the full flush of Simonon and Allen on "Three Changes" shuffling time even while holding the tempo to a dubbish gait. It's not Blur, the Clash, Fela, the Verve, or Gorillaz. It's more than just names on albums.