Pavement - Brighten The Corners CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

Hawaiian." If it has a color, it's definitely getting brighter.

Burned out on the provincial mannerisms of Britpop, Blur tried to make their idea of a Pavement record: fewer pub-sing-along choruses and less Kink-y classicism, more abstract guitar spray and distortion-box static atop Damon Albarn's singing. Fortunately, Blur are too British and too handy with a well-turned song hook (that great "*weehoo!*" in "Song 2") to go the whole low-fi hog. It would be a waste of "M.O.R.'s" breezy riffola -- David Bowie's "Boys Keep Swinging" via Mott the Hoople -- and the insouciant gleam of "On Your Own." Yet by copping a few tricks from U.S. art-garage rock, Blur have, if nothing else, sidestepped the inevitable dead end of U.K. retropop. In "Look Inside America," Albarn sings about the road life here, about after-show