Before we hear Gorillaz, we hear the bansuri. The first track on the British band’s new album ‘The Mountain’ opens with the voice of the bamboo flute originating from the Indian subcontinent.
The flute charts a winding course through the drone of the tanpura, the sitar, and the drumming of the tabla. It leads us to the dead: the late Dennis Hopper’s muffled voice closes the song, repeating, “The mountain, the mountain / All good souls come to rest.”
In just under five minutes, listeners are thrust into a new world, constructed by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s encounters with grief and their time spent in India. Alongside a posse of collaborators (dead and alive) and in the skin of the fictional 2-D, Murdoc Niccals, Noodle, and Russel Hobbs, the duo captures the unmooring quality of life after death – or living after someone you love has died.
By leaning on their virtual nature and artistic collaborations, Gorillaz adopt different voices, travel across space and time, and navigate new ways of grieving.
At times, these voices are placed in direct conversation with each other. In ‘The Hardest Thing’, Albarn sings, sans distortion and uncharacteristically vulnerable: “You know the hardest thing / is to say goodbye to someone you love.” The track is slow and haunting, and Albarn’s voice melts into an instrumental led by the bansuri and the trumpet.
In the very next track, ‘Orange County’, these words are reframed and set to an upbeat rhythm. Albarn’s voice, this time, is distorted in a style more typical of the duo’s music. Kara Jackson responds to Albarn’s despondent confession, singing: “Another start / Get another chance to love.”
The songs placed together invite us into a cyclical conversation between the bereaved characters, seemingly opposed in their approach to loss.
Running away from the tumult of heartbreak, the duo pieces together yet another personality that indulges in delusion and dishonesty. In ‘The Happy Dictator’, pain is pushed away as the insistent autocrat drones, “No more bad news / So you can sleep well at night / And the palace of your mind will be bright!” The dictator promises its desperate subjects, “I am the one to give you life again / I am the one to save your soul / Amen!”
But, ultimately, the conversation returns to the task of confronting oneself and transforming. In ‘Moon Cave’, Asha Puthli’s otherworldly refrain insists “you must wash all your perfume from your body” and “you will never recognise me again.”
The album’s winding discussion on loss and its many characters are brought together by a consistent presence of Indian instrumentation and vignettes of life in the country.
Albarn and Hewlett’s discography is marked by cross-cultural collaboration, and the duo has previously spoken about the importance of this exchange.
Unlike projects where South Asian culture is appropriated and orientalized (re: the music video for DJ Snake and Major Lazer’s wildly popular track ‘Lean On‘), ‘The Mountain’ dives headfirst into the country’s musical landscape and features a true collaboration with established Indian artists, which the duo credits for breathing life into their projects.
“It [the album] had to have that community, because we’re obscured by the cartoons,” Albarn told Rolling Stone. “The only way there could be a real sense of a human interaction was with the people we work with.”
But more importantly, the album was created as Albarn contended with his own grief in India. By plunging into the personal and remaining loyal to experimentation, Gorillaz can communicate the experience of confronting mortality in a new land and experiencing new, local approaches to grief without mythologising India. They focus on the alien-ness of emotional pain as opposed to the alien-ness of a new culture, and carefully avert the all-too-familiar scramble to position themselves as insiders.
With ‘The Mountain’, Albarn and Hewlett allow us into an intimate conversation between a host of love and grief-stricken characters. And while death rears its head on nearly every track, listening to this album makes one feel desperately alive.
‘The Mountain’ by Gorillaz is out now.
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