Ten years after it all kicked off, the Britpop era has fallen squarely under the historical spotlight. John Harris’s impressively detailed book The Last Party, which is published next week by Fourth Estate, and John Dower’s short feature film, Live Forever, have both taken stock of a phenomenon which, like punk before it, gave British music an unusually parochial sense of identity.

Starting out at a time when the industry’s ears were tuned in to the grunge sound of Seattle, groups including Blur, Suede, Pulp and Oasis offered a vibrant, homegrown alternative by emphasising their regional English roots.

Unfortunately, that is precisely where all the key Britpop players have remained — except Blur. Having long since dispensed with the jolly tunes and vaudeville banter of the Britpop years, the frontman, Damon Albarn, has steered his troops down a succession of unlikely and experimental routes, all of which have turned out to be paved with gold, while steadily increasing his grip on the reins of power.

Since the last Blur album, 13, released four years ago, he has mounted a side project, Gorillaz, whose debut sold five million copies — about twice the number of the best-selling Blur album — and recorded an ethnic-fusion album, Mali Music, in Africa. Both projects have informed the music on the new Blur album, Think Tank (Parlophone), a dark yet exotic cocktail of influences drawn from far and wide that leaves the competition floundering in its wake.

Albarn has also elbowed guitarist Graham Coxon out of the way, for the time being (“he just wasn’t comfortable with me calling the shots”).

Coxon is featured on only the last track, a slow, sad swansong called Battery in Your Leg, and it is a testament to the group’s uncanny powers of reinvention that, even without a replacement, his presence is hardly missed. Albarn covers for him well enough where necessary, as on the brilliant Blur-type rocker Crazy Beat (co-produced by Fatboy Slim) and the one-line garage-band blast of We’ve Got a File on You.

But for the most part the emphasis is shifted away from guitars towards a more ethnic, vaguely North African feel on tracks such as Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club, in which a casbah-era Clash vocal sound is set to a jaunty Bo Diddley beat.

Although a curiously charmless operater, Albarn knows how to keep his muse in good working order. Like David Bowie in the 1970s, he glides like a shark through the waters of musical fashion, biting off chunks from the creatures around him. “I’m a darkened soul/ My streets all pop music and gold” he croons in Sweet Song, one of several numbers including the current single, Out of Time, that are graced by gentle, unresolved melodies with a melancholy undertow.

If the album has a flaw, it is in the sometimes rather aimless ebb and flow of numbers such as Caravan and Jets, the latter a funny but ultimately indulgent piece of jazz-rock filler that could have benefited from a more brutal hand in the edit suite. But whatever its faults, Think Tank is an album bursting with invention and a sense of fresh possibility — after surviving for ten years near the top, that is no mean feat.

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