<\/p>\n
Before we hear Gorillaz, we hear the bansuri. The first track on the British band\u2019s new album ‘The Mountain’ opens with the voice of the bamboo flute originating from the Indian subcontinent.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s muffled voice closes the song, repeating, \u201cThe mountain, the mountain \/ All good souls come to rest.\u201d<\/p>\n
In just under five minutes, listeners are thrust into a new world, constructed by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
By leaning on their virtual nature and artistic collaborations, Gorillaz adopt different voices, travel across space and time, and navigate new ways of grieving.<\/p>\n
At times, these voices are placed in direct conversation with each other. In ‘The Hardest Thing’, Albarn sings, sans distortion and uncharacteristically vulnerable: \u201cYou know the hardest thing \/ is to say goodbye to someone you love.\u201d The track is slow and haunting, and Albarn\u2019s voice melts into an instrumental led by the bansuri and the trumpet.<\/p>\n
In the very next track, ‘Orange County’, these words are reframed and set to an upbeat rhythm. Albarn\u2019s voice, this time, is distorted in a style more typical of the duo\u2019s music. Kara Jackson responds to Albarn\u2019s despondent confession, singing: \u201cAnother start \/ Get another chance to love.\u201d<\/p>\n
The songs placed together invite us into a cyclical conversation between the bereaved characters, seemingly opposed in their approach to loss.<\/p>\n
Running away from the tumult of heartbreak, the duo pieces together yet another personality that indulges in delusion and dishonesty. In \u2018The Happy Dictator’, pain is pushed away as the insistent autocrat drones, \u201cNo more bad news \/ So you can sleep well at night \/ And the palace of your mind will be bright!\u201d The dictator promises its desperate subjects, \u201cI am the one to give you life again \/ I am the one to save your soul \/ Amen!\u201d<\/p>\n
But, ultimately, the conversation returns to the task of confronting oneself and transforming. In ‘Moon Cave’, Asha Puthli\u2019s otherworldly refrain insists \u201cyou must wash all your perfume from your body\u201d and \u201cyou will never recognise me again.\u201d<\/p>\n
The album\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Albarn and Hewlett\u2019s discography is marked by cross-cultural collaboration, and the duo has previously spoken about <\/a>the importance of this exchange.<\/p>\n Unlike projects where South Asian culture is appropriated and orientalized (re: the music video for DJ Snake and Major Lazer\u2019s wildly popular track ‘Lean On<\/a>‘), ‘The Mountain’ dives headfirst into the country\u2019s musical landscape and features a true collaboration with established Indian artists, which the duo credits for breathing life into their projects.<\/p>\n