Gorillaz - The Mountain 📀
A Beautiful, Deeply Personal Experience. Gorillaz' Magnum Opus?
Background: The Mountain is the ninth studio album by the virtual band Gorillaz. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett began working on the album in India following Albarn’s completion of the opera The Magic Flute II: La Malédiction. Recording in locations such as Jaipur and Mumbai directly altered the album’s technical composition. The producers integrated Indian classical instrumentation with their established electronic and pop foundations. Prior to their time in India, both creators experienced the deaths of their fathers. Because of this, the album focuses on the subjects of death, grief, and the afterlife. To further develop the thematic focus on mortality, Albarn specifically included unused, posthumous vocal recordings from deceased former collaborators. In addition to these posthumous appearances, the album includes new performances from many international artists, that at least I had never heard of.
Review: While Gorillaz had their most commercially successful period in the 2000s with 2005's Demon Days, featuring one of their most successful songs, Feel Good Inc., they reached their highest level of creativity with 2010's Plastic Beach, which is one of my favorite albums of the past decade. Songs like Empire Ants and On Melancholy Hill shaped my adolescence. Naturally, I have always felt a strong connection to Gorillaz. However, since 2010, I felt like they could never repeat that level of success. The musical quality was always there, but it was almost too inaccessible and not enjoyable enough. Expecting their best times were over, I was not too excited about this release and rather listened to it coincidentally on a Saturday morning run. And I was blown away. The intro song, The Mountain, makes it immediately clear that this is something special. This project is calm, less electronic than previous works, and much more internationally focused, incorporating a different country's influence for every single song. This brings together some of the most unique sounds I have heard in years. It ranges from beautiful, emotional tracks like Orange County, to some of the most intense Spanish rap I have heard on The Manifesto, to Arabic classical singing on Damascus. This sounds chaotic, but it combines so naturally that this is one of the most conceptual, special musical experiences I have had in a very long time. There are barely any tracks to skip, and the album should be experienced from start to finish. If it were a bit shorter and did not have two songs I dislike (The God of Lying and Delirium), it would have received a perfect score. The Mountain is a special, emotionally impactful experience and is Gorillaz's best work so far.
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By the way, the vinyl emoji in the headline serves as an additional quality metric in my reviews, showing that I intend to get a physical copy of the album. The first one this year!
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