Blur
Think Tank

THE REVIEW

In 1928, Magritte painted "The Lovers," two people of opposite sexes wrapped in a sheet trying to kiss. Or at least, they try. Observing that painting is like trying to smell the air on a warm spring morning and feeling nothing, your nose blocked and the flowers outside, shyly blooming after a long and reluctant winter; observing that painting is like when in dreams you try to speak but something prevents you, and you try with all your strength but cannot utter a sound, no one hears you, you flail about, unable to remember the moment you lent your voice to Ursula in exchange for legs, having the legs you have, but the voice, you don't. That kiss represents this terrible impossibility: you try to connect with another human being, but your condition doesn't allow it, and you are limited to a stifled kiss. The same sensations the cover of this album evokes in me.

The cover of Think Tank was specially made for Blur by Banksy in 2003 and depicts two people, a man and a woman, in the act of embracing, an embrace that is thought to be a prelude to a kiss that will never happen, because they both have gigantic diving helmets preventing them from getting close. They are truly cumbersome. Here too, there is an impossibility of connection, of relationship, the barrier between two people who are essentially underwater, in an environment without air where it is impossible to breathe, talk, carry out normal vital functions. And if there were two masks? Banksy in 2021 would have drawn two masks (they probably would have been gas masks), an image that had become so inflated of a near future in which we would protect ourselves from each other, seeing in the other the danger of being affected and destroyed; unfortunately, that future for us is the present, it's an impossible relationship, a suffocating and suffocated kiss, an alkaline and toxic fusion. Nevertheless, Think Tank is many things: besides having a historical-political reference, being an entity born during the Second World War that deals with public policies founded in the US, it represents the hope for better relationships, it is a "think tank" that while being an explosion of creativity on one side, doesn't allow immediate action on the other, swimming in water that creates resistance and doesn't let us reach the shore of spontaneity. And it is possibly here that resides the conceptual-experimental gap of the album. The concept of the impossibility of relationship is the main meaningful base of the album, an album full of hope for a better future, made of more transparent, flourishing, sincere relationships; in fact, the Blur hadn't been getting on for a while, Damon Albarn had been traveling the world and experimenting with other projects, such as with the fantastic Gorillaz. At this point, he had thought: why not go back to the old friends and make them understand through a completely introspective and at times truly sweet album how their relationship could have been better? Why not wipe away all the tabloid gossip about Blur simply by making great music? After all, that's what matters, and that's what they did.

Think Tank is undoubtedly far from the Britpop sounds of the previous albums and is certainly the result of very broad experimentation: it indeed also presents exotic and truly interesting sounds, all linked by the idea of layering sounds: a sound environment in which to immerse and recover lost relations, with oneself and the world. All the tracks have a specific character, each of them is characteristically disruptive (we're talking about Crazy Beat, the punk of We’ve got a File on You, the more ethnic resonances of the Clash in Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club) with sweet and melodic traits (we're obviously talking about the masterpiece of the album Out of Time, a perfect fusion of melody and experimentation).

Think Tank is a world of sounds where Blur reinvent themselves and put into practice their ability to alienate themselves from the world and transform this floating situation trying to occasionally put their feet on the ground, a ground called Britpop that manages to tone down the general anti-gravitational air of the album. Each track of the album sketches a different panorama: we are faced with small monads enclosed within themselves, self-sufficient, small universes of multilateral and multicultural thought that constitute a pearl in Blur's curriculum. Ethnic sounds that blend with electronic and futuristic beats, showing the inevitable triviality of the musical sense which in its immediacy results self-sufficient and effective. A sound journey that enriches, never predictable, which can objectively also leave one a bit disoriented and floating. At this point, one wonders: "Are We Out of Time?”