There's No Other Way

There is something hypnotic and slightly sinister about the way this song moves — a motorik groove borrowed loosely from krautrock, a bassline that walks in circles rather than forward, and a guitar tone so trebly and angular it feels almost confrontational. Damon Albarn sounds bored in the most deliberate way possible, his vocal delivery flat and nasal, as though enthusiasm would be a kind of defeat. This affectlessness is the whole emotional strategy: the song doesn't tell you how to feel, it creates a mood of mild dissociation and then holds it there, unresolved, for three minutes. The production has a distinctly early-nineties British quality — slightly cheap-sounding in a way that now reads as purely intentional — and Graham Coxon's guitar work oscillates between jangly indie prettiness and something rawer and more abrasive. Lyrically, the song deals with the exhausted push-pull of a relationship where both parties have stopped trying, where proximity has replaced actual connection. It's a song about inertia dressed up as indifference. Blur were operating in Madchester's long shadow when they made this, trying to find their own identity, and you can hear the straining in the record's strange, hovering energy. It belongs to the moment when British indie music was figuring out what it wanted to be after acid house. You listen to this on a grey afternoon when you can't decide whether to leave or stay, when the most honest feeling available is a kind of elegant numbness.