Blur – 13 (1999)

As a teenager, Blur was one of my favourite bands. I even really liked their fashion sense (Adidas shoes and jackets). I have to mention straight away that I was NOT a fan of the fashion sense of Oasis even if I liked their music. I remember copying a bunch of Blur albums onto a minidisc from one of my friends, but later on I ended up buying all the albums myself. This all happened before this album was out. I remember finding this album a bit of a disappointment when it came out. It has a couple of brilliant songs, but the rest of it is a bit boring. This album, for me, was the true end of Britpop, which defined in large parts the 90's music for me. The end of Britpop led me to more contemporary sounding indie rock, so I guess it was a good change in a way. Despite of all that, Blur has historically speaking been one of the most important bands of my life.



I saw Blur live at Provinssirock, a Finnish music festival, in 1999. This was a couple of months after the release of 13. I remember being a bit disappointed in the set list, but still being really excited to see them live. I guess most of the audience shared my feelings, because when they played some of their more recognisable earlier songs, the crowd went wild. I was only 16 years old, so music festivals were still something truly amazing (although I had my first taste of music festivals in Ruisrock in 1995). There were some other truly amazing bands on that festival, such as Manic Street Preachers, but Blur was the main reason I wanted to go.

The hit songs Tender and Coffee and TV are also my favourite songs from this album. This doesn't necessarily happen to me this often that the most popular songs would be also the best songs, but with Blur, there's this is the case in most albums. I have great memories of both of these songs. I learned to play Coffee and TV on my guitar when I was quite young and I just remember being really excited by the unconventional chord progressions. So, even if the song sounds very poppy, there are some strange musical features in this song. My most memorable memory about Tender on the other hand is that after a really bad cover gig I played in Suomenlinna sea fortress in Helsinki with some of my friends, we were playing Tender on an acoustic guitar on the pier waiting for a ferry and other people joined in singing along and some people were pounding various things for rhythm. It was one of those light and warm Finnish summer nights and this has really stayed in my mind ever since.

Coffee and TV also has one of my all time favourite music videos. It's great how much emotion you can get from a walking carton of milk.

No Distance Left to Run is also a fairly good song towards the end of the album. It has that similar calm and hypnotising feel to it as Strange News from Another Star on Blur's self-titled album that came before this one. I really like Damon Albarn's voice, when he sings with a toned down laconic expression.

Unfortunately the rest of the album is kind of boring and it's really difficult to grasp some of the songs at all. There are some songs with almost annoying noise sequences such as B.L.U.R.E.M.I. I've learned to appreciate these kinds of non-melodic pieces a bit more more lately while I've been making these blogs and gotten out of my comfort zone. This is kind of strange in a sense that usually people get more conventional in their music taste when they grow older. But anyway, I don't think Blur's 13 is necessarily that good of an album as a whole, but it definitely has some excellent individual songs on it and even some of the less exciting songs have great sounds and productional gimmicks.

Album on Spotify.