Astralwerks
2005
Happiness In Magazines
About This Album
It's suitably perverse that Graham Coxon released his first full-fledged pop album, Happiness in Magazines, in 2004, the year after his former bandmates in Blur tipped the scale in favor of the indie art rock he championed while he was in the band. Coxon always functioned as a passive-aggressive catalyst in Blur, pushing songs forward and twisting them inside out with his thrilling, fluid guitar. He was raised on the same British punk and pop as his former collaborator Damon Albarn -- the same stack of records by the Smiths, the Specials, and the Jam -- but he had an instinct to pursue a different path than prevailing pop culture, leading Albarn down the path to the Brit-pop of Parklife and the American indie pastiche of Blur and 13. On the latter two, he began singing his own compositions, soon stretching out to a series of dogmatically lo-fi solo records before leaving the band during the sessions for its seventh album. Blur continued down the willfully messy indie path with Think Tank, obscuring their songs with meandering arrangements, but Coxon's own contrarian instincts set in when he cut his fifth solo album in 2003: he turned back to guitar pop. He reunited with Stephen Street, who produced Blur's best albums, but retained much of the rough-hewn D.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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