I was one of the few people, surely, who preferred Gorillaz’ Cracker Island to Blur’s comeback The Ballad Of Darren. It wasn’t that the Blur album was bad, but that it was a bit dull and safe, the kind of thing Damon Albarn thought people expected. Gorillaz, though, is where Albarn can explore pretty much any musical collaboration or style that strikes his fancy and that automatically makes it the more interesting entity. (Plus, I was always team Oasis, but that’s neither here nor there. According to Albarn, Oasis won the war anyway).
What seemed like a novelty in 2001 and “Clint Eastwood” has since become an ongoing concern for 25 years and nine albums. The Mountain is definitely the band’s most serious and worldcentric album to date, featuring the usual array of diverse collaborators and focusing on themes of death and the afterlife. Strong influences of Indian music infuse the album; the whole package is ambitious and different, and it debuted at the top of the British charts upon its release.
Death is at the forefront of the album because both Albarn and Jamie Hewlett lost their fathers recently, but rather than a morbid rumination on mortality, the band uses Eastern music and voices as part of their attempt to make peace. But then in a brilliant move, voices of previous Gorillaz collaborators who have since passed on are woven into the songs, with passages and lines taken from previous unreleased collaborations. The message is that people live on after death.
Disco-fried beats are prevalent on the album, of course (as on “The Moon Cave” and “The Happy Dictator”), with strings swirling and the Indian sitar, tambura and bansuri weaving, creating a tapestry that doesn’t exactly celebrate death but is generally not morbid about it. Witness how the whistles and horns lift what could have been a bummer in “The Hardest Thing” and “Orange County” into something almost hopeful, which repeat Albarn’s simple declaration “You know the hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love.”
Albarn and Hewlett are nakedly emotional on “The Empty Dream Machine,” which gives vibes of an Indian-infused late-period David Bowie with a guest rap from Black Thought and the repeated closing line “I need you on my team.” It’s utterly arresting, an emotional capstone for the album… and it’s only halfway through the hour-long playlist.
In fact, putting that song in that position is hard to follow, and eventually The Mountain starts to become too much of a good thing. “The Manifesto” takes far too long to get to its guest rap from Proof (formerly of D12, and recorded on 9/12/01 when the rap group was in England the day after the towers fell); “Casablanca” and “The Plastic Guru” never quite nail the vibe they’re going for and “Delirium” is willingly weird in a carnival barker sort of way, though Mark E. Smith’s performance almost salvages it. A couple songs toward the end also could have been shelved for later just to shorten the run time and make the best tracks here hit harder. However, special credit goes to “Damascus,” a hybrid Indian/hip-hop call-and-response track with outstanding work by Yasiin Bey and Omar Souleyman; it’s easily one of the best tracks on the album.
At times it feels like the Indian musicians (and Johnny Marr, who pops up a lot here) are added on for vibe more than for true musical input, but when the songwriting blends the hip-hop, Indian, African and British approaches, The Mountain accomplishes what it’s going for. It’s audacious, ambitious and frequently moving, words you don’t normally associate with Gorillaz, but the only words that describe this career high.