Park Life
Blur
1994: SBK/Food K2-29194
My enduring impression of “Park Life” is that of the chorus/title being honked off-key (deliberately and skilfully) by my coworker Spencer in the Glasgow office of Wizards of the Coast whenever the song happened to play on the CD/radio. That it’s a smug little smirk of a track on its own is just redundant in that context, but it does also have so many lovely little touches throughout that I still love to listen to it.
The juicily tight guitar flourishes on “Girls & Boys” are in a similar category—easily lost in the wake of the dominant first impression but so very tasty and worthy of consideration when you can get round to them. It’s a niftily amusing song even if you can’t hear the details, richly clustered with hit-and-run lyrical nuggets summarizing modern life’s most superficial minutiae and the whole boy/girl scene and highlighting the quirky nuances of gender interplay.
“This Is a Low” is probably my favorite track on Park Life, with the two aforementioned songs arguably competing for First Place on their amusement value. But this one has a feeling of both the profoundly presented Contemporary English Life theme that pervades this album and the wide-reaching wrapup that scope asks for (it doesn’t quite meet that challenge, but it does provide a fine closing note even if it is followed by a bit of additional culturally relevant fluff). It ebbs and flows like tide at dead seaside towns, but here there’s color in the clouds and more than a little love of country to warm the scene, as well as irony.
I don’t think there’s a bad track on this album, although some are weaker than others. But talk about quibbling!
Comments © 2005 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted, and no claim is made to the images and quoted lyrics.