It’s been a long time since an album has obsessed me as much as The Mountain, the new Gorillaz release; ironically, probably the last Blur album, The Ballad of Darren, underscoring how oddly important Damon Albarn has been to my musical sense of self as I’ve grown older. What’s perhaps funny is, as much as I’ve enjoyed and followed all his work since… fuck, probably Parklife back in 1994…? I don’t think I’ve seen myself in his work as much as I have in these last couple of albums, in large part because I feel like both of them are attempts to regain past glories that succeed because they’re not simply retreads of what came before.
Don’t get me wrong; both The Mountain and The Ballad of Darren have their moments where Albarn and his various collaborators are definitely speaking the musical languages of their past and feeling very nostalgic as they do so. But that’s not what makes them work as well as they do, for me; instead, it’s the tension that comes from doing that while nonetheless speaking from who they are today, older and no wiser but maybe a lot sadder — there’s a weight to Blur’s “I fucked up/I’m not the first to do it” as someone speaking in their mid-50s that wasn’t there in their earlier work; in the same way, “The hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love, that’s the hardest thing” hits me harder at 51, knowing that it’s about grieving a parent and having gone through that myself. (That it’s followed by the line, “Your legacy frightens me/Will I keep it gold?” only deepens that.)
I’m fascinated by the way that Albarn grows old but refuses to just play the hits or else pretend to be himself decades earlier when he was more popular — more than that, that he refuses to do that but still tries to compete, at least in pop music terms. There’s something about how oddly stubborn that is that charms me, as much as the fact that he manages to somehow make good music and still get the respect of critics and fans in the process…?
All of which is to say: I’m still listening to The Mountain and still finding new things to appreciate in it. Not least of which is the Mark E. Smith track, which is exactly as chaotic and messy as it should be, really.