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 the band, 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 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 Britpop 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 their 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.I.Y. feel of his solo projects for
Happiness in Magazines, and the result is a wonderful fusion of ragged invention and sharp, tuneful songwriting. While the basic sound of the record isn't quite a surprise -- since
Coxon still plays the bulk of the instruments, it does sound like a homemade record, but the songwriting recalls vintage
Blur, so it does sound familiar -- what is a shock is that
Coxon has the confidence and will to not hide behind the noise and obscurist tendencies that made his previous solo efforts a bit laborious. Here, his emotions are pushed to the surface and they're married to catchy, memorable songs that are delivered in an immediate, imaginative fashion. This return to guitar pop doesn't feel like a retreat, it feels like a warm acceptance of
Coxon's strengths, particularly because he hasn't completely abandoned the guitar squalls and unpolished production of his other four efforts. And that's why
Happiness in Magazines feels like
Coxon's first true solo album -- it's the first to present a complex, robust portrait of him as an artist, and the first that holds its own next to what he accomplished in
Blur.