Blur - 13

Arizona Daily Wildcat

Imagine riding Disney's Magic Mountain naked. That's what experiencing Blur's new album is like. It is dizzying. You are removed from a secure sense of time and place and in this brooding darkness, only a few sonic rushes create a bodily delight. But those may be coming from Uranus.

Blur's 13, so anticipated since their cagey but promising 1997 album, eponymously called Blur, is distant. The formerly lucid electronic rhythms are here elaborated to a point of flat confusion. Hiring producer William Orbit from Madonna's Ray of Light crew may have been a savvy business move, but it makes for a divided allegiance between tune and tone, music and monotony. In the balance sheet of Blur's future, 13 may end up being their unlucky number.

- brad senning