Gorillaz is back with their ninth album
“Mountain” their first in three years (Cracker Island). The men behind the
group Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett said this would be a “very different” and
boy they were right. They both experienced the
loss of close family members prior to their time in India and both described
the album as a cohesive and conceptual work exploring ideas of death and the
afterlife through the band's fictional characters. Hewlett said people
listening to the album are "supposed to listen to it from beginning to
end", saying that they were "trying to bring back that idea of taking
time to invest in something, instead of this culture of scrolling". The
album's name was inspired by the duo's first visit to Amber
Fort in Jaipur, as well as a mountain
they visited in western China during the production of the opera Monkey: Journey to
the West. The Mountain debuted
at number seven on the US Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 53,000 equivalent album units, which includes 38,000 in pure album sales and 15,000
streaming units. It became the group's sixth top-ten record in the United
States. There is even a short film for this album as well.
What makes this group successful is how
they blend so many different genres together and blend so many collaborations
together to one coherent song or album. This album has at least twenty five
featured artists either alive or dead. This album feels like they had their
“George Harrison” moment of embracing Indian music and culture to be put into
their music. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t work.
The opening track-the name of the album,
“The Mountain” is an almost five-minute instrumental of Indian music. The same
goes for “The Manifesto” it sounds like multiple songs in one since its seven
minutes of Indian music or reggaton as both of these tracks are just too long
with nothing in return. The second track “Moon cave” is almost like the first
track with instrumentals with little vocals; it does sound like music for a
movie so it is slightly better with some catchy lyrics but some not.
There are a lot of reflective and
emotional tracks on this album like “The Hardest Thing”, “The Empty Dream Machine”, “Casablanca”, “The Sweet Prince” and the final track “The Sad G-d”. The
main issue is all of them have something off about each of them like talking
instead of singing, some eeriness to it but most importantly all have some sort
of Indian vibe to it/are too long. Tracks like the “G-d of Lying”, “Shadowy Light” and “Plastic Guru” they have some catchiness to them but still get
ruined by the Indian music vibes but one of them kind of mixes well together. While
“Damascus” sounds like they are in an Indian night club using Indian words and
“Delirium” sounds like a choir is singing behind him eerily.
I am in the minority from other
places in that they are praising them for this bold mix of Indian culture with
their grieving/death/afterlife themes. This was a miss and that is ok when you
have made nine albums, not every album has to be a hit. But please next time
maybe just not go up the mountain and keep going the path you have been on
before which is blending multiple genres and many collaborators into one coherent
amazing sound.
