Having just landed in Boston after a grueling European tour, the lower third of Blur -- bassist and compositional conspirator Alex James -- is laughing, riffing on the nagging notion of being a British tabloid fave and an arena rock god in his native land.

"Here," he says of the States, "we're still playing nightclubs." He pauses and giggles. "But we're No. 1 in Chile. And Israel. And we'll have the first No. 1 on Mars." More on that later.

debut, Leisure, Blur have been sort of a curiosity, an exotic, eccentric, Anglophiliac's wet dream who -- like their influences The Kinks, XTC, Roxy Music -- mean a lot but sell a little.

"We were full of beans when we first got here," he says. "We've developed into a culty thing here since then. You see people with their wry smiles at our gigs. But those smiles never developed into the massive thing they did everywhere else."

Britpop was blather. The U.K.'s post-baggy-scene sheen of 1994-96 was rife with yobbos recklessly and fecklessly replacing the grooves of their immediate forefathers (indie-dance kings Happy Mondays) with a mod melodicism and a cleaned-up sense of the psychedelic (Syd Barrett without the acid). Like Oasis.

The only other band in the Britpop stakes was Blur, four guys who met as kids and stayed a unit: The fey, frantic vocals and cocksure lyrics of Damon Albarn, the vulnerable guitar brio of Graham Coxon and the rhythmic overdrive of Dave Rowntree and James could do no wrong.

"Once we started doing arenas, it became less about playing to people who cared about music and more of a fucking circus, a casino thing." But Blur raged against the adding machine, developing from the quaint hit shimmer of "She's So High," "Country House" and singing "Waterloo Sunset" on the telly with Ray Davies himself, to charging into the ad-exec rock of "Song 2," the chilling glam of "Girls and Boys" and bristlingly bleak CDs The Great Escape and Blur. They followed with the panic-stricken emotionalism of 13 and their finest, wildest and subtlest moment yet, Think Tank (Virgin).

During all this, singer/lyricist Albarn went off into a wonderland of experimentation with great rewards, aesthetically and financially: a million-selling, Grammy-nominated, dub-electro-pop Gorillaz with Dan The Automator; a solo CD, Mali Music, that utilized a sequencer-based, tribal traditionalism and mannered Anglicism unheard of since Talking Heads and his own old-school reggae label, Honest Jon's, that studies the influences of calypso and ska on Brit culture.

While that seems a normal trajectory, Blur paid the price of experimenting, as longtime guitarist Coxon left the band during winter 2002, at the beginning of Tank's initial recording sessions with producer Fatboy Slim. "Ours was a delicate balance, impossible to put a finger on who left what and why," says James of Coxon's "disappearance."

"Graham's the best guitar player in the world. But he's not the only guitarist in the world." Rather than splinter, Blur, who always share songwriting credits and own their own recording studio, got tighter and weirder at once, quickly creating a scrambled, maximal minimalism of brusque explosive rhythms and spare-but-layered musics that ran the gamut from tender and desert-imagistic ("Caravan," "Good Song") to robotically punkish ("Crazy Beat") to quietly quirky and tender "Ambulance" and the Moroccan-inflected "Out of Time."

"When you take the loudest guitar player in England out of the equation, things do start to get groovier," says James of Tank's propulsive rhythmic heft. "You take the guitars off of AC/DC, that'd probably sound funkier too."

As Albarn continues to write the lyrics with great literate passion, musically, Blur's individual roles meld together. "You become a production unit. Especially when you have to," says James, pointing at the loss of "brother" Coxon. But as much as that fracture wounded Blur as a match-of-mates, it breathed creative oxygen into their process -- a guitar-as-texture tonic that shows on the radically supple, spacy and somber moods of Tank. "Ironically, it's quite sophisticated yet primitive -- sparse music generated in an old-fashioned way with musty microphones and vintage synthesizers. You have to make formal sense of this playful muck."

Traveling to Africa to record a chunk of Think Tank gave the melee a crumbling ancient-to-future sensibility at one with Albarn's Gorillaz but totally unique, in that it's forged by a band and not a "project." Think of Tank as a musical Planet of the Apes ripe with notions of tribalism, lost romanticism and future frenzy. As an aside, it probably helped the interplanetary hum of Tank that Blur was working on the first music to be heard on Mars via the U.K.'s Beagle 2 space project. "There is no British space program to speak of as all our scientists work for you Americans. The money's better. But when professors began to throw bits of Mars at us, we figured we'd wave the flag for them and show our support. They're real show-biz characters. And they've made some quite sexy space experiments in order to look for life on Mars."

"We had to re-find our boundaries," says James of Blur's combined DNA surviving the loss of a guitarist and gaining a sense of godliness. "We came out of it more alive than usual. I even think it's religious -- our first grown-up, happily contented record ever. Ultimately, I have no idea what and how it happens, which is probably why the record is so fucking good."