Blur
B-Sides

THE REVIEW

A genuine hidden treasure.

The four have released (besides the 7 official albums) 22 EPs, meaning the latest single along with its b-sides, making it 22. That's about 260 minutes of unreleased album material (260!), practically a parallel discography, and believe me, there's truly enough in here to lose your head as Blur explores a wide variety of genres with a freedom, with an open-mindedness truly out of this world. It makes one think of a band perpetually closed in a recording studio shaping their overflowing creativity, knowing what they managed to produce in only 8 years.

Hold on tight. Because here psychedelic mantras and extended and often instrumental experiments ("Down", "Inertia", "Luminous", "Bustin + Dronin", "Berserk", "Garden Central", "Black Book", "Mellow Jam", "Dance Hall", "French Song") go hand in hand with drunken waltzes ("Anniversary Waltz", "Daisy Bell" - which turns punk in the chorus!) or eerie ones ("Got Yer!"), jazz ("Beard"), pop-rock ("Explain", "Uncle Love", "All We Want", "Magpie", "All Your Life", "My Ark", "Into Another", "One Born Every Minute", "I'm Fine"), punk-rock ("Popscene" - complete with horns, their historic failure never released on an album, "No Monsters In Me", "Never Clever"), assorted madness and hallucinations ("Hangin' Over", "Es Shmecht", "Rednecks", "Alex's Song", "Ludwig", "Badgeman Brown"), lysergic pieces ("Polished Stone", "The Man Who Left Himself", "Peach", "Bone Bag", "Beachcoma", "Mace", "Tame"), noise ("Swallows In The Heatwave", "Day Upon Day", "Won't Do It"), and so much more (there's even a section dedicated to their earliest songs when they still called themselves "Seymour", between pop and punk-noise in the Pixies' style, and sometimes even more "frenzied" than them).

All filtered through their unmistakable style.

There are a total of 68 songs, several of which exceed 6, 7, 8, 9 minutes.

Absolutely essential to fully understand Blur's art, who relegated such a precious and vast repertoire to b-sides with a nonchalance and even irritating recklessness.