Released with an art book, new games, and extended videos, a multicultural, multifarious and multilingual return for the collective cartoon pop-hip-hop project led by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, with many intercontinental guest appearances, and a particular Indian musical and visual flavour centred on fictional Himalayan peak as metaphor for life’s journey and illusionary truths. The theme was emotionally affected by both Albarn and Hewlett losing their fathers during the creative and recording process (with a particular song of crestfallen, whistling legacy - Orange County – “You know the hardest thing is to say goodbye / To someone you love”, and The Sweet Prince conjures a usuall downbeat Albarn at his father’s hospital bedside – “I was trying to say I love you, but you just looked the other way”), but there also reincarnations in the form of unreleased recordings with former and now late other collaborators, including Bobby Womack on The Moon Cave, Mark E Smith’s unmistakable spoken delivery on Delirium, Tony Allen The Hardest Thing, actor Dennis Hopper on the title track opener, Proof of D12 and Trugoy the Dove of De La Soul.
In this reflection on the living and the dead, and time passing in a circularity (“Living is the ending of the beginning”), a sense of place often seems to recur in this project in the more recent times of their 25-year history whether that be Cracker Island or Plastic Beach. Here the mythical mountain is home to host of characters including false prophets and leaders, but also begs the question where life goes once your reach the top and the end. The ghostly melancholy of Albarn’s voice also pervades the release, but the distinctive beauty at play is instrumentation of Anoushka Shankar and other Indian musicians on the opener, with Shankar appearing on a number of tracks, and Johnny Marr also making regular appearances. As well as reincarnating recorded snippets of artists who have passed away, a sense of nostalgia also comes from Hewlett’s visuals, employing old-school non-computer hand-coloured animation, with the The Mountain, The Moon Cave and The Sad God, featuring the usual virtual quartet of characters 2D, Murdoc Niccals, Noodle & Russel Hobbs, but inserting them to recreate, reference and subvert scenes from the original The Jungle Book on this triple video. The scope of the album is vast, but filled with more magic moments than padding, from the catchy, poppy, satirical The Happy Dictator with Sparks (“The palace of your mind will be bright!”), the melancholic, melodic, gentle The Hardest Thing (with Allen), the husky delivery of IDLES’s Joe Talbot on The God of Lying, Gruff Rhys’s and Asha Bhosle’s gentle vocals on The Shadowy Light, fabulous rapping by The Roots’ Black Thought on more than one track especially The Moon Cave, a wonderful Middle Eastern flavour on Damascus with Omar Souleyman and Yasiin Bey, and Spanish rap (with Indian flavours by Argentinian rapper Trueno on The Manifesto. A hugely ambitious project in scope, but delivered with panache and style, and another success for this popular and remarkable project that has vastly outsold all of other Albarn’s many bands. Out on their label Kong.
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