GORILLAZ The Mountain( Kong)
When Blur frontman Damon Albarn announced his new side project, Gorillaz, around the turn of the millennium, it was a clever way to mask a solo album in some sort of Banana Splits / Saturday morning cartoon irony. We weren’ t going to find out more about the pop star’ s personal life, but we were going to have a fun time either way. Fast forward a quarter century, and Gorillaz has more or less turned into Damon Albarn’ s main concentration. The cartoon characters are still present( 2D, Murdoc, Noodle & Russel) courtesy of cartoonist Jamie Hewlett, but Albarn’ s true self has slowly come into focus. The Mountain, the ninth album from Gorillaz, finds Albarn and Hewlett tackling monumental personal loss head-on by leaving their comfort zone and traveling eastward. The kaleidoscopic array of sounds, featuring dozens of musicians from multiple continents, finds Albarn as a cloaked Svengali, not looking for the spotlight( usually obscuring his vocals with effects), even though he co-writes every song here. With a cinematic touch, the album opens with the instrumental title track, recorded after a visit to Rajasthan in Northern India, where they recorded a folk musician playing a stringed ravanahatha that they then accompanied in their nearby hotel room. The music of Gorillaz has always been multi-cultural, but this album is really their first foray into Eastern music. They don’ t just dip their toes, they jump headfirst into a wide universe of sounds. 92- year-old Asha Bosle, famous in India as being one of the greatest stars of Hindi cinema as well as the inspiration behind Cornershop’ s 1997 hit single“ Brimful Of Asha,” blesses“ The Shadowy Light” with her one-of-a-kind vocal approach. It’ s not all spectral mysticism, as the group also dabbles in street-level Arabic hip-hop with“ The Manifesto” and the uptempo dancehall / Dabke( a traditional Middle Eastern folk music) mash-up of“ Damascus,” named after the world’ s oldest capital city. With all these different world music styles merging together, it would be a prime opportunity to inject blatant politics into the music. Gorillaz
seem more content to unite than to divide, whilst looking inward rather than outward.“ The Happy Dictator” finds Damon and the quirky pop duo Sparks using a bouncy new wave keyboard loop on a track loosely based on a visit to Turkmenistan, where they learned about Saparmurat Niyazov, a dictator who banned all bad news within the country so the population could sleep at night, unaffected by the doom of the world. The real masterpiece here is“ The Hardest Thing / Orange County” propelled by grief as well as a deceptively sunny whistling melody where Damon repeats the mantra“ You know the hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love, that’ s the hardest thing” while Anoushka Shankar( daughter of the late great Ravi) plucks a gorgeous sitar over a shuffling rhythm. Damon and Oak Park’ s Kara Jackson trade verses about loss and heartbreak, something that affects the east and the west in equal measure. In any just world, this would become a hit, and it fits nicely within the pantheon of great Damon Albarn ballads along with“ To The End,”“ The Universal,”“ No Distance Left To Run,” and“ On Melancholy Hill." The band puts effort into honoring those musicians who have passed from the Gorillaz universe in the past 25 years, with late greats Tony Allen, Dennis Hopper, Mark E. Smith, David Jolicoeur, and Bobby Womack all appearing posthumously. While the huge guest list may be unwieldy and somewhat messy, that ends up being one of The Mountain’ s greatest assets. Being their first effort for their own independent record label Kong after decades on Parlophone, The Mountain represents simultaneously a new beginning for the Gorillaz and the end of something. Here’ s to hoping there are more mountains to scale for Gorillaz in the near future.
– Andy Derer
8 BRIGITTE CALLS ME BABY Irreversible( ATO)
Chicago’ s Brigitte Calls Me Baby explores love, loss, and the struggle to move forward on their sophomore album, Irreversible. And they make it sound so good. Here, they build on and expand the
16 illinoisentertainer. com april 2026