or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

Damon Albarn’s effort to paint himself as a pan-global everyman, dallying with multicultural, multiethnic bands and influences is, depending on whom you ask, either an awakening or an affectation. Either way, it’s the most ironic note ever struck in a career that at one point was built on irony and arch-observational lyrics. (Some could crow that he’s gone from rewriting the musical history of Andy Partridge or Ray Davies or Suggs to rewriting his own.)

In the mid-1990s, Albarn was the poster boy for parochialism, hosting a television special celebrating Britpop and romanticizing British Images from Primrose Hill to the shipping reports. Then the band’s quantum leap into super-stardom and the reactions to fame nearly resulted in its demise. It also led to a schizophrenic album that its cartoonish worst provided endless critical weaponry and allegations that its relative failure forced them down a series of calculated musical roads.

At its best, however, The Great Escape offers moments of swollen hearts and strings that leave me clamoring for the repeat button. I can’t think of another album in which I dislike so many individual parts that I choose to listen to as a whole as often as this. In some ways, the faults are as compelling as the successes, a view probably not the least bit helped from listening to the record then (and now) 3,000 miles away from any hints of the band’s ubiquity. Regardless, along the arc of the band’s career, the album’s drawbacks make it even more fascinating, although it is clearly not the point for Blur neophytes to become acquainted with the group.

At the height of the band’s fame and fractured relationship, guitarist Graham Coxon retreated into post-punk and U.S. hardcore. His appropriate disgust with the overall horror of the pig-riding, celebrity-cuddling video for “Country House” led to him spending most of his time during the promo clip for “The Universal” sat on the ground of a stage or the odd man out of three-shots of band performance. He’s as much a missing person in that clip as he is some years later in the milk carton-inspired “Coffee and TV.” It also obscured his contributions to this record, reducing what used to be a sound with a pop sensibility wrapped in a rough cover become simply a sheen of unit-shifting ambition. The drone, fuzz, and angularity that marks the second halves of Modern Life Is Rubbish and Parklife is still here, but the band’s duality is hidden behind a bit too much gloss.

Albarn is to blame for the setbacks. The wit and bite of his previous character sketches or perceptive writing is dulled, obscured by the notion that he is doing something that is somehow important. He went from satirical to sneering, lampooning easy targets (the right wing, suburban life, the singles-bar lout) instead of dwelling on the lie that the habitual lives and empty clutches at escape of the working classes is heroic. The upper-classes motorboat outings—wonderfully illustrated on the cover—may have an element of the ridiculous, but at least they’ve got the means to settle into their country estates (and so did Albarn by this time), which most any council-home dweller would likely embrace in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately, most of Albarn’s scribbling about the upper tax bracket are as dull and imaginative as the rest of the sleeve’s business chart-and-dress motif. Rather than finding oddity in the everyday as the cover does, the lyrics to tracks such as “Country House,” “Mr. Robinson’s Quango,” “Top Man,” and “Charmless Man” offer anything but subtlety. Worse are lyrical car crashes such as “He’s Hugo / And he’s boss” or “He just sits in his leather room and twiddles his thumb / Gets his secretary in and pinches her bum.”

Yet when Albarn isn’t attempting to be rollicking or uproarious, rewriting his oompa melodies over another skewer of the white upper-middle-class, he is treading in waters of regret with understated glory. “Best Days” and “He Thought of Cars” pick up lounge-inspired post-punk where More Specials left it. “Entertain Me” draws the line between the Kurt Cobain and the Baz Luhrmann versions of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Even better is “The Universal,” a shot of post-millennial collective paranoia and anticlimax whose grandeur is—far from the “This Is a Low,” Mk II that is often cited—a 180-degree rewrite of the private “is this it?” of Parklife’s acoustic, pre-millennial gem “End of the Century.”

The throat-clenching grace of album closer ”Yuko and Hiro” is the album’s peak and, not coincidentally, the one moment when Damon is precisely not attempting to make comment on British culture.

An odd rating then for an “odd” album: I surely listen to this record more than any 6/10 record I could name. Hell, it’s strike rate of decent songs may not even be 60%, but this is a valuable piece in a musical puzzle than I repeatedly find myself breaking up and putting back together in different ways, and enjoying more with each effort.