It was their highest charting album in the United States, reaching number 56 on the Billboard 200. Think Tank also reached the top 20 in many other countries, including Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Norway and Japan. Anti-war themes are recurrent in the album as well as in associated artwork and promotional videos.Īfter leaking onto the internet in March, Think Tank was released on and entered the UK Albums Chart at number one, making it Blur's fifth consecutive studio album to reach the top spot. Albarn, a pacifist, had spoken out against the invasion of Afghanistan and, after Western nations threatened to invade Iraq, took part in the widespread protests against the war. Think Tank is a loose concept album, which Albarn has stated is about "love and politics". This is the only Blur album to not feature Coxon as a full-time member he returned to the band for their next album The Magic Whip (2015). After initial recording sessions, Coxon left, leaving little of his presence on the finished album. After he re-joined, relationships between him and the other members became strained. At the start of the sessions, guitarist Graham Coxon had been in rehab for alcoholism. The album's primary producer was Ben Hillier with additional production by Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim), and William Orbit. Recording sessions started in November 2001, taking place in London, Morocco and Devon, and finished a year later. There are also heavy influences from dance music, hip hop, dub, jazz, and African music, an indication of songwriter Damon Albarn's expanding musical interests. Continuing the jam-based studio constructions of the group's previous album, 13 (1999), the album expanded on the use of sampled rhythm loops and brooding, heavy electronic sounds. Meanwhile, Drummer Dave Rowntree went into politics, and bassist Alex James runs his own cheese farm in Kingham, Oxfordshire.īlur got back together in 2008 and toured, but fans had to wait until 2015 before their comeback-album The Magic Whip was released.Think Tank is the seventh studio album by the English rock band Blur, released on. Frontman Damon Albarn stayed in the music business both as a solo artist and with his cartoon band Gorillaz and supergroup The Good, the Bad and the Queen, and Coxon also continued making music. However, due to rising tensions among the band members and the eventual departure of guitarist Graham Coxon, Blur went on a hiatus in 2003. Their rivalry with contemporaries Oasis culminated in one of the most famous chart battles in British history – one which Blur won when “ Country House” outsold Oasis’s “ Roll With It” by 50,000 copies, giving Blur their first #1 single in the process.įollowing this, the group embarked on a new musical direction, deliberately heading away from their trademark Britpop sound and instead taking influences from American alternative rock, a sound which earned them new fans in the US and gave them their second UK #1: “Beetlebum” in 1997. British rock group Blur formed in 1988 and began life as a fairly unsuccessful shoegaze/madchester outfit, but the band quickly developed into becoming one of the leaders of the massive 1990s Britpop scene.
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