Blur - Parklife [2LP]

Blur's Parklife is the album that made Britpop a household word, pressed here as a double LP that gives its sprawling sequence plenty of room.

Released in 1994, it rescued the band after the modest sales of Modern Life Is Rubbish and turned them into national stars. Damon Albarn wrote it as a loose collection of character sketches about English life, inspired in part by Martin Amis's London Fields, and producer Stephen Street gave those vignettes a bright, punchy sound.

The singles alone could carry it. "Girls and Boys" is a synth-pop strut about holiday hedonism, the title track features actor Phil Daniels delivering a cheeky spoken-word tour of park life, and "End of a Century" is a gently melancholy look at domestic routine. Near the end, "This Is a Low" arrives as a grand, shipping-forecast-inspired ballad that many fans rank among the band's finest moments.

Graham Coxon's guitars veer from punk sprint to new-wave jerk, and the record keeps switching moods, taking in a music-hall waltz and a breathless thrash along the way.

Few albums capture a time and place so vividly, or with so much affection for the oddities of everyday life. Decades on, its wit and warmth still make it a joy from start to finish.