Blur offer new songs, Måneskin looking for warmth and sex

The closer the summer, the more actively passions boil in the civilized musical space. Both youth and veterans rushed to world tours, everything is very colorful and intense on the map of European festivals. Among the events of recent days is the return, which few people expected, and the big concert, which died down very close, at least geographically.

Blur is back with new songs

“I want to see you dance, you filthy old man!” Damon Albarn yells from the stage as Boys & Girls, the classic Blur hit that seems to get more and more frantic as the years go by, begins a serious movement. The fact that the concert in the British town of Colchester, Essex, which is native to the group, is an event that is largely unexpected gives additional excitement to everything that is happening.

Everything related to Blur has been covered in rumors and uncertainty for the last eight years. After the release of the album The Magic Whip in 2015, the musicians skated off the tour and fled again. Since then, there has been occasional talk of new songs and a full-fledged reunion, although frontman and lead writer Damon Albarn put on an ironic, mysterious face and expressed the hope that he would never have to play with his band again. It was completely impossible to understand where the intentions were here and where the British humor was.

In some ways, the members of Blur are a classic dysfunctional family, and from time to time they need to stay away from each other. The good news is that musicians know how to keep themselves busy. The busiest, of course, is Mr. Albarn. In addition to the well-known project Gorillaz, almost more than Blur, Damon has other musical ventures of various calibers. Guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree are of course not as active, but when Blur was on hiatus, they were quite successful ranging from solo albums and session music to cheese making.

And here they are together again. The album, called The Ballad of Darren, is finished, the band plays European festivals in the summer and arranges a two-day haul at London’s Wembley. Before performing on large venues, the musicians decided to give themselves a little warm-up and play a few small concerts. However, small in terms of the venue, but not in terms of the set list. Two hours of retrospective hits and two new songs.

“We finished the album three weeks ago and could certainly rehearse more,” Damon remarks from the stage in Colchester. Underrehearsing is probably one of the main tricks of Blur. They seem to be a little relaxed, obviously not chasing perfection and allow themselves to screw up, but a little and very elegant, which always touches the audience.

On the album, the ninth in the band’s discography, the musicians worked together with producer James Ford, who previously recorded Arctic Monkeys, Foals, Depeche Mode. As Damon Albarn recalls, he recorded some demos for the ten tracks included in the record in hotels during the Gorillaz tour. “There was a funny moment in Montreal,” the musician says at a small press conference before the concert. “Leonard Cohen was looking at me from the wall of the house opposite from a beautiful mural, so I worked from the bottom of my heart.”

Some veil over the album is lifted by the songs of St. Charles Square and Narcissist, the latter already released as a single. The track turned out to be very Albarnian. It has been noted more than once that Damon’s songs are very environmentally friendly, because they are collected as if from garbage that no one else was interested in. I remember the story about the multi-platinum single Clint Eastwood from the debut album Gorillaz. The sample, from which the whole track was made, was cut by Damon in the basic settings of a simple synthesizer, and this confirms the amazing gift of the musician to draw a hit from anything. Narcissist is built on a fairly simple guitar riff and a bit lazy rhythm, but the result is very atmospheric.

Britpop fans, of course, hope that Blur with their new album and concerts will return to the musical everyday life a certain retro guitar vibe, which has been clearly lacking lately. By the way, other Britpop heroes are not idle this summer either. Both Suede and Pulp can be caught on different grounds. Increasingly, there is talk of a possible reconciliation between the Gallagher brothers and, as a result, Oasis entering the stage. And the more actively Noel and Liam refute everything, the more reliable such rumors sound.

Ma°neskin looking for warmth and sex

Italian glam rockers have been actively reaping their live harvest since the release of their album Rush at the beginning of the year. The audience is clearly not tired of their posturing and hits on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and at a recent show in Latvia, Måneskin gathered about twenty thousand people.

Riga’s Mezaparks is a playground for serious artists, and the recognized sold-out kings here are the local Brainsorm. However, the still current status of hotties made Måneskin the subject of serious excitement, and fans from neighboring Lithuania also came to see the idols, since the Baltic logistics format makes such trips not tiring.

The show was presented to the attention of a serious crowd, unfolding on two stages: the main one for electric prowess, the small one for sentimental acoustics. The combination of English-language tracks with songs in Italian is sometimes perceived rather strangely, but it is precisely this strangeness that partly dilutes the musical set, which does not shine with variety. Måneskin work out their caricatured glam quite sweepingly, but music as such is clearly not their main trump card.

The musicians spoke little, did not make any ideological statements and limited themselves to thoughts of an exclusively practical nature. “It’s cool in here, I wouldn’t mind getting laid,” said frontman Damiano David, which may have fired the imagination of everyone who wanted to warm up this way on this chilly evening.

“It’s terribly monotonous, but charisma splatters, fluid gender too,” eyewitnesses of the events shared their feelings with ZD and quite accurately repeated some of the impressions from the group’s other shows. A more sympathetic audience notices that Måneskin are confidently getting out of the Eurovision trail and have a chance to become the second team after ABBA who managed to give a full start to their international career (after winning the contest in 2021), where, as is commonly believed, the stars are not born. In today’s world, forecasts are the last thing, but right now, Italian rockers are in chocolate, even if there is no one to warm them.