The newest album from cartoon band, The Gorillaz, is marked with grief, spirit, and remembrance. Both Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett lost close family members as they embarked to India to start working on The Mountain. The album has an international flair with Arabic singing on a couple of songs including “The Shadowy Light” and the peppy single, “The Manifesto” that is partly sung in Spanish, rapping courtesy of Trueno and Proof.
The album starts with the serene sounds of the title track, with its Indian influenced extended intro with spoken lyrics about the mountain and serenity standing out. The Indian sound later appears on “The Empty Dream Machine” where Albarn sings that “I thought I’d got my life straight”. “The Hardest Things” is a shorter song on the emotions of trying to say goodbye, the theme carries over into “Orange County” with a few great verses by poet Kara Jackson.
Politics and religion clash a few times. Russell Mael from Sparks appears on “The Happy Dictator” about a trip Albarn took to Turkmenistan with his daughter where the leader of the country keeps bad news from the people in order to keep them happy. The welcome guitar sounds of Johnny Marr appear on a few tracks including the spacey “Plastic Guru” about a religious fraud who is focused on celebrity.
The voices of those who have left us are weaved throughout the album including Mark E. Smith, the rapping of Trugoy the Dove, Dennis Hopper, and the beloved Tony Allen amongst others. The album ends with two quieter, dreamy tracks concluding with God’s perspective on the sad state of humanity. “I gave you white sails to reach the sun/I gave you atoms, you built a bomb”. The Mountain is a fine album to escape into for an hour.
8/10
The Light Appears 