This post contains no laughs. Feel free to ignore it.
Blur's second album came out at around the peak of my love affair with music. I spent so much of my meagre income on music in that year that at one stage I had to eat nothing but baked potatoes for a month because I had about 28 bucks left to my name. Everything else was spent on music. No lie.
I had previously loved Blur's first album Leisure and had introduced as many people to it as I could. I requested tracks from it at indie dance clubs, and then stared at my feet and shuffled when they came on. I bought copies of magazines with promo pictures of the band in them. I took seriously an article in the NME that said they were the next Jesus and Mary Chain. I drank the Kool-Aid.
Then Modern Life is Rubbish was released, and I absolutely hated it. Noisy, ponderous and self-important, I thought. Not good to dance to, I thought. No hypercolour artwork, I thought. I listened to it at friends' houses a couple of times, and then promptly decided it was shit and never listened to it again until around 2001.
It was only then that I realised that this is one of those rare things - an actually good album. It sounds as good today in 2007 as it did when I gave it another chance in 2001. And as good as it did in 1993 when I was too foolish to recognise it.
What prompted me to write this? Well I recently went through all the music in my collection and realised that in my travels I have lost this LP somewhere. All of a sudden I had a massive craving to listen to the album track Villa Rosie, a song simultaneously maudlin and uplifting. And I realised at that point just how good this album is - I was jonesing to hear track 11 on a 14-year-old record.
That is a good sign. So, give it a listen. I rebought it on iTunes and am loving every second of it.
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