To open this oddball supergroup's debut, Paul Simonon hints at "Guns of Brixton," and when Tony Allen's flex rhythms come in, there's a shadow of Fela Kuti, too. Then Damon Albarn's slow grit of a voice enters--framed by Simon Tong's flecked guitar. And collectively, The Good, the Bad, & the Queen is quickly sui generis, adamantly different than anything you think you've heard. A band with this much power has at least two options: to cut loose raucously or to mute their overt power for a more covert, dub-inflected atmospheric potency. Smartly, Albarn and his crew opt for the half-light of elastic bass lines, the clouds between the parentheses of drums--the covert. It's not until "Kingdom of Doom," the erstwhile 'single' of the album, that motion expands beyond the languorous. And even then, Tony Allen largely sits out. You get the full flush of Simonon and Allen on "Three Changes" shuffling time even while holding the tempo to a dubbish gait. It's not Blur, the Clash, Fela, the Verve, or Gorillaz. It's more than just names on albums. --Andrew Bartlett
Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Around the turn of the millennium -- just after the release of Blur's moody sixth album, 13 -- Damon Albarn began to quietly back away from the very concept of fronting a rock band, turning his attention to a series of collaborative projects that soon overshadowed his main gig. First there was the electro-bubblegum group Gorillaz, which afforded Albarn the opportunity to masquerade behind a cartoon, a move that allowed him to let his music speak louder than his fame, a method that he found irresistible as he began to do several projects similar to this, including a voyage to Africa documented on Mali Music, along with other less-publicized forays into soundtracks. In this context, the post-Graham Coxon Blur albumThink Tank seemed less like a band effort than another conceptual project directed by Albarn instead of the work of a band, which is what all these new-millennium projects were at their core, including the Good, the Bad & the Queen, a quartet comprised of himself, Clash bassist Paul Simonon, Verve guitarist Simon Tong, and Tony Allen, Fela Kuti's drummer, who was name-checked in Blur's "Music Is My Radar," and whose eponymous 2007 album is produced by Danger Mouse, who previously collaborated with Albarn on Gorillaz's second album, 2005's Demon Days. A flurry of pre-release activity compared The Good, the Bad & the Queen to Blur's 1994 masterpiece Parklife, as it represents a conscious return to Albarn writing songs specifically about London at a particular point in time. Thematically accurate though this may be, it is also misleading, suggesting that Albarn is also returning to the bright, colorful, clever guitar pop that made his reputation -- something akin to Coxon's reclamation of that sound on his excellent recent solo albums, Happiness in Magazines and Love Travels at Illegal Speeds. That couldn't be farther from the truth, as The Good, the Bad & the Queen is deliberately drained of color and mired in moodiness. If Parklife exuberantly captured the giddiness of the mid-'90s, as fashions and politics changed, ushering in New Labor, Britpop, and new lad culture, The Good, the Bad & the Queen captures how all that optimism has calcified into weary cynicism, as the endless opportunities of the '90s have given way to a warring world that seems to lack any center or certainty. So, in that sense, it is a cousin to Parklife in how it captures a national mood, but in sheer sonic terms, the closet antecedent of Albarn's is Demon Days, which traced out an apocalyptic vision despite its insistent pop hooks. Which isn't to say that The Good, the Bad & the Queen is a Gorillaz album in disguise, nor should Simonon's presence suggest that this is the second coming of London Calling; if anything, GBQ suggest the Specials at their most haunted, which is hardly uncharacteristic of Damon, who has always used "Ghost Town" as a blueprint whenever he's wanted to get spooky.
Despite these echoes of the past -- and there are other echoes, too, arriving in Simonon's thundering dub bass, Tong's spectral guitars, Allen's nimble rhythms, and Albarn's vaudevillian piano and carnivalesque organ -- The Good, the Bad & the Queen is most certainly its own distinctive thing, the product of five iconoclastic musicians working a theme endlessly, relentlessly, and inventively, producing music that plays more like a movie than an album. Early on, as "History Song" eases into view on a circular acoustic guitar phrase, it establishes an alluring, dank, and artfully dour mood that the band continually expands and explores without ever letting the gloom lift. But for as dark as this is, GBQ never sounds despairing -- it's wearily resigned, as Albarn and his bandmates prefer to luxuriously wallow in the murk instead of finding a way out of it. There's a comfort in its melancholy, particularly in how the album glides from one elegantly doleful song to another, but at times the album almost sounds too samey, with no individual song emerging from the whole. Part of the reason for this is Danger Mouse's production: it's as subtle and clever as ever, but built largely in the post-production -- to the extent that he'll mix out Allen for large stretches of the album just for the aural effect. He's orchestrated a unified, dramatic album -- it's a tapestry of impeccable, sorrowful, yet sultry soundscapes -- but given the pedigree of this band, it's hard not to wish that the album offered more of the quartet just playing, gussied up with no effect. Nevertheless, as an album The Good, the Bad & the Queen is singularly effective, bringing the roiling melancholy undercurrent of Demon Days to the surface and creating a murky, mud-streaked impressionistic rock noir that's sinisterly seductive in its gloom.
The Good, the Bad & the Queen
The Good, the Bad & the Queen
[Virgin; 2007]
Rating: 6.8
Damon Albarn has been branded a dictator, a dilettante, even a bit daft. But to be fair, the guy's biggest mistake since entering the post-Blur era has been his failure to recognize it as the post-Blur era. So even as he globetrots to Mali or grooves in Gorillaz, everything Albarn does feels a little bit like a side project, which unfortunately casts his often quite good music as an afterthought rather than the real deal.
If perception is such a big part of the game, though, then Albarn has stacked things in his favor with the Good, the Bad & the Queen-- another name, another band, this one with something for nearly everyone because it features someone for nearly everyone. On bass, Clash veteran Paul Simonon. On guitar, Simon Tong, late of the Verve. On drums, the unimpeachable Afrobeat master Tony Allen. Behind the boards, somewhere, the ubiquitous, beloved Danger Mouse. And Albarn himself on top, his ego and voice the would-be X-factor that ties these disparate kindred souls together.
A name like the Good, the Bad & the Queen, awkward though it may be, implies a certain degree of fun to be had, and on its face you'd think the all-star cast would cinch it, but that's not what Commander Albarn and crew are up to. Feel Bad, Inc. would be a more appropriate moniker for this moody and often dreary outfit. To call the doom-laden tracks on the self-titled disc downbeat would be an understatement. Downtrodden is more like it, as Albarn has (subversively? deviously? deliriously?) instructed or encouraged these purveyors of pulsating grooves to slow things down to a narcotic crawl for most of the record's duration. The results are cohesive almost by default, considering how monochromatic the bulk of the disc comes off. Yet monochrome by design isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially when you're out to challenge rather than entertain.
No doubt, it's risky business to follow Gorillaz's well-selling and critically lauded Demon Days with music designed to move you emotionally rather than physically. An undercurrent of dissatisfaction courses through The Good, the Bad & the Queen, with a mumbly Albarn forcing you to lean deep into the murk to decipher his downer words. "History Song" sets the mood, opening with a simple acoustic guitar motif that's soon fleshed out-- barely-- by the submarine bass, haunted backing vocals, and a surprisingly restrained Allen skittering along. "80s Life" throws in rudimentary piano. And for the most part, back and forth the tracks go, reveling in simplicity despite the surplus of talented contributors, never once shaking free of the self-imposed shackles. Even the melodies sound intuitive and unfinished, as if Albarn didn't feel the need to elaborate on whatever spare demos he unearthed that gave birth to this album.
If there's a direct musical antecedent to Albarn mood music of this bent it's the early Blur track "Sing" (most prominently enlisted on the Trainspotting soundtrack), albeit bolstered by Simonon's dubby throb and set on the same paranoid, post-apocalyptic landscape of the two Gorillaz discs. Likewise, "The Northern Whale" and "The Bunting Song" are as prototypically, provincially English as anything by Blur as well, but they sound like sad, elegiac celebrations of what once was rather than what is, reminiscent in mood of Parklife's "This Is a Low". "The medicine man is here 24-7/ You can get it fast in Armageddon," moans Albarn in the first single "Herculean". "Everyone is on their way to Heaven, slowly." It's like his version of the simultaneously pre- and post-apocalyptic Children of Men-- contemporary malaise and moral decay recast ominously as science fiction.
And what's got Albarn down? Why, war of course. War, or reference to war, permeates or pops up in half the tracks-- "Nature Springs", "Behind the Sun", "Green Fields", "80s Life", "Kingdom of Doom"-- with war's horrors and aftermath alluded to in the rest. No specific war, per se, though one may infer Albarn's disagreement with the engagement in Iraq looms large. Only as presented here, the battle already sounds lost, the sound of a would-be revolutionary or freedom fighter giving up without a fight, weary with resignation as he digs yet another row of graves. "I don't want to live a war/ That's got no end in our time," goes a line in "80s Life", as hopeless a confession as one might hear.
No wonder the disc never really springs to life until "Three Changes", 10 songs in, though lyrically the song remains the same: "Today is dull and mild/ On a stroppy little island/ Of mixed up people" sounds like a mash-up of the weather report and editorial page.
Yet despite the relentless, beautiful gloom, as the concluding title track devolves into a noisy art-glam implosion it does feel like the end of a journey has been reached. But where have we been? And what did we learn along the way? That the world's in a bad place, of course. And Albarn's here to rub your face in it until that sinks in.
-Joshua Klein, January 15, 2007
|
