By Genre: Alternative, Indietronica
Favorite Tracks: “The Happy Dictator,” “The Manifesto,” “The Shadowy Light”
Are the Gorillaz a good band, or just cartoons? This has always been the existential question at the heart of each release. Somehow, after debuting in 2001 as an audacious animated group of (arguably annoying) hyperpop manga-inflected characters that blended hip hop, world beat, trip hop, dance, and pop into their own sound, the band is still going.
After a 2010 peak with PLASTIC BEACH, which still works wonderfully because it’s an album that both captures the vibey essence of the emerging decade while minimizing Damon Albarn’s worst impulses, the band has struggled to do much the last 15 years beyond treading water. While SONG MACHINE, SEASON ONE: STRANGE TIMES features more cohesive collaborations, there’s a strong sense that Albarn is just moving paper from one side of the desk to the other, musically speaking. Furthermore, the flexibility and inventiveness offered by animation became a vacuum of limitations when music orchestrated by a former Blur member is the art—there are only so many times one can hear Albarn filtered through some vocal effect that sizzles like a melting film reel, or a great rap verse melded with dumb-on-purpose circus music before you get the idea. This shadow is what makes the group’s ninth effort, THE MOUNTAIN, so fascinating, as it makes a case for the band’s ability to resonate, while also showing how its founders get in the way of that promise.
The essential lore of THE MOUNTAIN is that Albarn and his best friend, illustrator Jamie Hewlett, went to India to renew their creative marriage, lost their fathers within 10 days of one another, and, in the grand tradition of white guys of a certain age and Wes Anderson-esque disposition that travel to India, decided to predicate an album about grief on the rich history of the country’s cultural offerings. Albarn opened the archives and built tracks around new collaborators, yes, but also found unused takes from deceased greats like Bobby Womack. Herein lies the rub of the issue with the record: Albarn and co. might be capable of making a breathtaking testament to the loss of fathers, but the constraints of the act’s musicality aren’t the ideal venue for this effort.
Post-PLASTIC BEACH, the song arrangements have increasingly become sketches—grand tents for ideas both majestic and embarrassing. For reasons that are not for the listener to know, but to merely live in wonder of, the band, such as it is, has never thought to revisit their creative approach, which, unfortunately, punishes the collaborators on their latest effort more than usual. Black Thought, Omar Souleyman, Yassin Bey, Anoushka Shankar, et al., are employed to bring heat, but with the triptych focus of grief, Gorillaz music, and being a Gorillaz record about grief, it’s hard to understand if everyone knew exactly what they were working on. Individual portions are great, and the incredible host of musicians from and representing India are impeccable and world-class, but filtered through Albarn’s beloved production sensibility that puts everything mid-range, sincerity and solid song structure often fall apart.
Take, for example, “Moon Cave,” which starts off with gorgeous demon strings courtesy of Izzi Dunn, Kotono Sato, Sarah Tuke, and Ciara Ismail, and makes great use of Ajay Prasanna on bansuri, Anoushka Shankar on sitar, Olivia Jageurs on harp, and Viraj Acharya’s knockout percussion work as the track moves through its sections. Albarn, who truly has a voice perfectly suited for putting people of all ages to sleep with its dull edge, is put to work in late-night disco mode, which is one of very few lanes he can really score in. Together, they clarify the record’s focus and offer something moving and vulnerable. However, the song goes from Albarn singing about the place where he brought his tears, “Lit on the lantern / Of my childhood fears,” to a great but abrupt switch to a rollicking skip beat and powerhouse Black Thought verse. On their own, or as two ideas with a slower transition, they’re incredible, but in post-production assembly, they feel short-shrifted, like two cool things hoping to overcome imperfection through vibes.
Elsewhere, on “The Hardest Thing” and “Orange County,” the baffling decision is made to essentially repeat the same track twice, with “The Hardest Thing” as a heartwrenching sketch of processing death, and “Orange County” as a buffoon’s buffet of shit ideas tossed together in harmony, undoing the good work of the former’s more somber effort. It’s a Tommy Wiseou level of baffling that “Orange County” features the starker, pained intro of the previous track, and then cunts it up all over the field with whistling and the most obnoxious tuba possible, which makes an otherwise-inspired Kara Jackson vocal sound insincere, dumb, and worst of all, cute. Perhaps production didn’t realize they were creating a song that wouldn’t be out of place on the Sega Saturn game NIGHTS INTO DREAMS, but one can never know.
What makes this so frustrating is that when Albarn and company are on, they’re really on. Albarn is responsible for what is arguably Britpop’s greatest song, Blur’s “Tender,” which manages to groove and crescendo to something transcendent, a haunting, sing-along ode to love with delicate guitar twang that borders cheesy without being it. This promise of beauty in candied music buoys Albarn, and by extension, Gorillaz, who chase the elegiac cinematic beauty of a Donald Antrim work, the ending of Steven Conrad’s PATRIOT, Theodore Witcher’s LOVE JONES, or anything the extended Coltrane family has ever made. So much of THE MOUNTAIN floats above the earth, billowing out and refracting light with the help of guests like IDLES, Trueno, Proof, Black Thought, Omar Souleyman, Yassin Bey, Anoushka Shankar, and a murderer’s row of technical musicians. Where the placidness of Albarn and producers weigh down this transcendence and aide is as fascinating as it is infuriating. However, the missteps can’t outshine the great work being done by everyone else.
It’s tempting to wish for a cut of the record with just the tracks that featured the session musicians. As mentioned above, Albarn is chasing the sublime, and Shankar, Dunn, and the rest of the players help Albarn get closer to this than ever before. The gentle elegance they achieve through the appearance of effortless playing on “The Mountain,” which moves through a cycle of life’s seasons from fall-summer, or “The Shadowy Light,” where the players help offset Albarn’s lackluster vocals, sets the table for the listener, the allegro and legato movements suggesting a grand journey swirling romance and high tragedy into one emotional paint shade unlike anything else. Without the psychedelic harp work of Jageurs, or the percussion of Acharya, Albarn would truly have nothing to step on to get from A to B. Even reviewing, the players help illustrate the failings of the ambition because they aren’t the problem, but their absence often is (“Moon Cave” fails because there are no instrumental movements that help flesh out the transitions between two great ideas). It’s so easy to take session players for granted, but they fill out ideas in ways the voice and production beats can’t, and when THE MOUNTAIN gets close to the cinematic, or lets us imagine Albarn’s father and lost friends projected like reels from the other side of the veil, it’s thanks to the live players that production assembled.
As always, Albarn has wrangled incredible guests who enhance the soul of his low-simmering vocals, and combat his Benadryl-esque proclivities that create a flatness in delivery that reads as insincerity. In particular, the delight of IDLES’ Joe Talbot offering up every nuance he can find in his menacing purr of a feature on “The God of Lying,” how uniquely present Black Thought and Mos Def are in their features, how urgent they sound, and the depth of emotion Trueno brings to “The Manifesto” are highs that remind the listener what makes Gorillaz unlike anything else. However, counter to this are features like Bobby Womack, who save Albarn as much as they communicate an idea of loss. More than ever, the guests on THE MOUNTAIN illustrate the complexities of the project, not just by the way artists lift songs up, or showcasing the fresh air breathed in these collaborations, but in how production underserves the guests on the record by weighing down the tracks in post-production. To hear the songs live and to hear them beneath the slush of effects here are apparently night and day. For an album about grief, it’s hard to follow that thread when everything but the guests are drowned out, edited, cut, moved, or otherwise obscured.
THE MOUNTAIN is ultimately a communal and lovely testament to the idea of Damon Albarn taking a long hiatus from his project to pursue other creative endeavors. Gorillaz could continue with an interim leader, such as Flying Lotus, James Blake, or any of the former members of Radiant Children, but it doesn’t have to. The world doesn’t need Gorillaz … but Albarn might. However, maybe some time away living in the sunlight, away from the archives of friends alive and lost, away from a blue-haired cartoon that’s still his avatar in his mid-late 50s, will help the singer make the great music he aspires to without the burden of the band he’s filtered his songs through since the new century drew its earliest breath. If you think this is harsh, listen to his ending vocal on “The Empty Dream Machine” and consider a world where everything Albarn does on THE MOUNTAIN sounds as human and crisp.
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