The Future Never Came

Few sights are more forlorn than an old sci-fi film whose predictions of the future have, with the passing of time, been proved incorrect. We watch the flying cars, the robotic dogs, the pills that expand with a drop of water into seven-course meals and think: "This future's already past. This film was set in 1980; it's 1999 already, and none of this has happened." It's a fate worse than simply being dated. Films set in the hippie '60s or the greedy '80s will always have a time and place; futuristic failures belong nowhere, residing in neither the future nor the past but in an era that never happened.

13, the electronica-powered new album from the British rock band Blur, resides in precisely that sort of timeless limbo. Not timeless in a positive sense, in the way that, say, Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced? is timeless, but in the way that the old sci-fi series Space: 1999 is now timeless. The series was about the moon's being blown out of Earth orbit and traveling the universe. It's 1999, and our moon is still firmly in place. There's no reason to watch that series anymore.

Blur's last album, the eponymous Blur (1997), featured raw, guitar-driven rock and seemed to be influenced by the then dominant alternative-rock scene in America. On 13, Blur's sixth album, the band has enlisted producer William Orbit, the electro-guru behind Madonna's most recent album, Ray of Light. The result is that 13 is full of buzzing and whirring, guitar distortion and machine-generated beats. Unlike on Madonna's album, however, few of the songs here have danceable rhythms, and few have memorable tunes. Other British acts, including Radiohead and Unkle, have explored similar sonic territory with more interesting results.

The songs on 13 have a sketchy, first-take feeling to them. On another album, this might be a good thing; it might transmit to the listener a sense of improvisatory immediacy. But here it evokes mostly confusion, as if the band hadn't quite worked out exactly how it wanted to sound and what it wanted to say.

13 does have scattered moments of glory. The opening cut, Tender, is one of the album's best; it's an unexpectedly openhearted pop anthem, buoyed by a gospel chorus. Another standout song is Coffee & TV, a mellow, midtempo rocker. Blur can be a painfully smart band, and in these few songs, we come into palpable contact with its restless intelligence. However, much of the rest of the album is unfocused and fuzzy. Reportedly, some of this album was inspired by lead singer Damon Albarn's breakup with his longtime girlfriend, Justine Frischmann of the group Elastica. "It's over--I knew it would end this way," go the lyrics of one song, the bruised ballad No Distance Left to Run. This album's vision is clouded by pain. The future usually looks bleak after a breakup.