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The almost indecently rich material on The Mountain demonstrates a different approach: featuring a seemingly limitless cavalcade of guests (including Sparks, Johnny Marr, Gruff Rhys, Paul Simonon and Yasiin Bey) many of these songs wade knee-deep in loss, but their execution is bursting at the seams with vivacious joy.
Damon Albarn and Gorillaz co-creator, visual artist Jamie Hewlett lost their fathers in close succession. The bereavements brought the estranged creative partners closer again, and a shared trip to India (where Hewlett’s mother-in-law had suffered an ultimately fatal accident), a country with a rich musical heritage and a culture that considers death a new beginning, offered grounding for the stylistic and lyrical templates of The Mountain.
The idea of Gorillaz as a fictional group has allowed Albarn to blend his prodigious musical curiosity into a genre-defying, globe-trotting mash-up. The Mountain hops erratically from hip hop and electronic pop to Latin American rhythms, Indian music (a crucial core ingredient: sitar virtuoso Anoushka Shankar features particularly prominently), North African bounce and, on the murkily skanking “The God of Lying“ (with Joe Talbot of Idles on vocals), what resembles a 21st century digital retooling of “Ghost Town”. As such, the album offers a neat target for accusations of cultural appropriation (always a problematic concept, considering how music has evolved via a benevolent process of cultural cross-pollination), were it not for the fact that the representatives of global sounds are very much the star of the show, rather than credibility-boosting props to justify the equivalent of a musical gap year. Witness how legendary 91-year old Indian vocalist Asha Bhosle elevates “The Shadowy Light” with a haunting verse about a boat trip to afterlife, or the way that Syrian singer Omar Souleyman effectively owns “Damascus”, the most prominent straight-ahead banger on The Mountain.
Keeping with the album’s uniting themes (very loosely: life is transitory, and other realms may follow after we’ve passed from this one, with arresting glimpses of the here and now where demagogues and con artists peddling empty promises and very real threats dominate), Albarn has combed through cutoffs from past Gorillaz sessions for unused recordings of past collaborators who are no longer with us. Late De La Soul MC Dave Jolicoeur pitches in as an afterlife hype-man for Black Thought’s vivacious verbal acrobatics on “The Moon Cave”, and that’s Tony Allen’s voice at the start of “The Hardest Thing”, which sequences into “Orange County”, one of The Mountain’s most mesmerising mixtures of unfathomable sadness and loose-limbed jubilation, as Albarn’s wearily repeated mantra (‘’the hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love’’) merges into the track’s whistle-powered, fluorescent whirl.
The combination of guests living and dead leads to some initially jarring juxtapositions which eventually turn out to be formidably sharp assets. A cackling, gibberish-sprouting Mark E Smith tramples all over the cinematic melancholy of “Delirium” with thrillingly off-the-leash results, whilst the swaying gallop of “The Manifesto” (led by Argentinian MC Trueno) screeches to a halt for an intense guest verse from Proof, with dread-filled visions of death that mirror the Detroit MC’s own violent and untimely end.
The result is the most substantial and satisfying Gorillaz album since the widescreen 2005 art-pop masterpiece Demon Days and its almost as impressive successor, 2010’s sprawling Plastic Beach: a startlingly ambitious, thematically coherent return to top form after a handful of so-so collections of globally flavoured. However, The Mountain feels deeper and more emotionally resonant than any of its predecessors: for all the project’s other merits, it’s rarely been appropriate to describe Gorillaz as beautiful, profound or moving. That is the most apt description for The Mountain.
English (US) · 