Charmless Man

A character study delivered with the forensic pleasure of someone who has been waiting a long time to describe a particular type of person they despise. The guitar riff is angular and slightly contemptuous, the rhythm section driving with impatience, and Albarn's vocal achieves something technically difficult — genuine venom that still sounds like it's enjoying itself enormously. The song constructs its target with almost anthropological care: name-dropping, social climbing, the borrowed mannerisms of someone with no actual center. It belongs to the moment when the Britpop scene was becoming self-aware, when the media circus around it had attracted exactly the kind of people its best music was critiquing. There's a specificity to the details that makes it feel lived-in — this is not a type, it's a person, or at least a composite of several real ones Albarn had clearly been cataloguing with quiet fury. The brass arrangement gives it a music-hall nastiness that suits the subject, something theatrical and slightly grotesque. You put this on when you've spent an evening in the company of someone exhaustingly performative and need the catharsis of hearing that exhaustion named with precision and set to a tune you can't get out of your head for three days.