By Bryan Baste | Staff Writer
When Damon Albarn announced The Mountain, I was intrigued, as in my opinion, their last album, Cracker Island, failed to reach any sort of “good” expectation from me.
After listening, I can confidently say The Mountain is an improvement, albeit a very small one.
The album is filled with themes of life, death, grief, and the afterlife, and was heavily inspired by Indian Classical instrumentation, which you can hear throughout the record.
As well as many features on the record are posthumous, like Dennis Hopper, Tony Allen, Proof, and Mark E. Smith.
All this to say that I think the record has a more driven vision than the previous couple of Gorillaz albums. However, just because the album had a vision, it doesn’t mean it was executed well.
There are stellar moments on the record, like the first track, aptly titled The Mountain, which has a beautiful sitar instrumental that grows and builds on a swelling bansuri flute instrumental that is divine, and the added Dennis Hopper samples at the end were also a nice touch.
However, some moments bewilder me. The Manifesto, for instance, seemed like an amalgamation of three different songs with two verses from Argentinian rapper Trueno and one with Proof using 3 different instrumentals, with Damon inserting choruses and an ending verse.
The song, as the album feels bloated with ideas, also, did you even need the posthumous verse from Proof? He stands out in the song like a sore thumb, with the song containing one of the laziest fade-out beat switches I have ever heard in my life.
Delirium is another great example where I feel like I can get where Damon is coming from here, getting the late-great Mark E. Smith on this track, but the song legitimately sounds like a The Fall outtake. The cheesy disco beat and synths do work and fit in the Gorillaz sound; however, they sound horribly overproduced like the rest of the record.
The whole album sounds flat and empty; some of the ideas really work, but they do under the most boring production I’ve heard this year. It sounds like Damon is messing around in a $1 million studio.
Overall, I enjoyed the record but middling at best, and pretentiously overproduced at worst.
5/10
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