13

13 by Blur was one of their weirder releases. I don't necessarily mean good weird either. It was the 6th Blur album. It was a post break up record. It was an in-the-midst-of-a-heroin addiction record. It was a band not getting along record. They had released 4 'britpop' records and this one continued on their stylistic shift away from that sound which the previous self-titled album began. It had a couple of perfect radio pop hits and was produced by William Orbit instead of long time producer Stephen Street. For me it has a couple of other non radio songs that are just absolute gems. Sadly though, there are a bunch of noisy dead end songs that just feel lifeless and pointless. They start the album with a beautiful gospel tinged love song which would have bled perfectly into "Coffee & TV" but for some reason they decided to pop a noisy rock & roll song called "Bugman" in between them. Just a godawful song that sounds like they were trying for another stadium sports song hit like "Song 2" and failed miserably. the 4th song has a promising hook that never takes off or even goes anywhere because the band seems lost in some sort of heroin sludge haze ("Swamp Song"). "B.L.U.R.E.M.I." and "Battle" are good songs but between them is more pointless noise and half songs including "Caramel" which is another heroin song where they beat you over the head with clues from the song title to the slow fading looped faraway in a dream sound. There's noisy songs for the sake of noise and pretty songs with random noise. The good songs are good but the bad songs are really. fucking. bad.

Anyway, I had long ago made a playlist with the good songs on there. Sometimes I'd give a crap one another chance and re-add it but they just never stuck. When the 2012 Special Edition was released it contained a continuation of "Mellow Song" called "Mellow Jam" which I was able to pop into Ableton and combine giving myself a beautiful long version of an already great song. I trimmed some noise from other songs and basically turned a bloated 13 song 67 minute long album into a short, sweet and mellow 7 song 35 minute long mini-LP.

"Things were starting to fall apart between the four of us," drummer Dave Rowntree later revealed. "It was quite a sad process making it. People were not turning up to the sessions, or turning up drunk, being abusive and storming off." In Orbit's words, "There was a battle between Damon's more experimental direction, and Graham's punk one, and Graham prevailed. If that tension had been growing on previous LPs, it came to a head here."

Tracklisting:
No Distance Left To Run
Tender
Coffee & TV
B.L.U.R.E.M.I.
Mellow Song/Mellow Jam
Battle
Optigan 1

Tender is the ghost
The ghost I love the most
Hiding from the sun
Waiting for the night to come