{"id":8751,"date":"2026-02-12T10:53:23","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T10:53:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/gorillaz-the-mountain-reviewed-death-rebirth-and-reinvention-153174\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T10:53:23","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T10:53:23","slug":"gorillaz-the-mountain-reviewed-death-rebirth-and-reinvention-153174","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/gorillaz-the-mountain-reviewed-death-rebirth-and-reinvention-153174\/","title":{"rendered":"Gorillaz\u2019 The Mountain reviewed: death, rebirth and reinvention"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

In TV they talk of the \u201canthology series\u201d: a regular, recurring show, like The Twilight Zone, Tales Of The Unexpected, Inside No.9 or Black Mirror, where each episode has a different setting, cast and sometimes director, unified only by a small team of writers or showrunners. In a similar vein, you could see certain 21st-century outfits \u2013 Sault, UNKLE, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Mr Jukes \u2013 as \u201canthology groups\u201d: modular ensembles with a shifting cast of guest musicians and vocalists, changing from song to song.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
Click here and subscribe to Uncut<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

In TV they talk of the \u201canthology series\u201d: a regular, recurring show, like The Twilight Zone, Tales Of The Unexpected, Inside No.9 or Black Mirror, where each episode has a different setting, cast and sometimes director, unified only by a small team of writers or showrunners. In a similar vein, you could see certain 21st-century outfits \u2013 Sault, UNKLE, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Mr Jukes \u2013 as \u201canthology groups\u201d: modular ensembles with a shifting cast of guest musicians and vocalists, changing from song to song.<\/p>\n

Gorillaz are, of course, the anthology group ne plus ultra<\/em>. Just two threads hold the project together. One is the punky, cartoonish artwork of Jamie Hewlett; the other is the anything-goes sonic adventurism of Damon Albarn \u2013 always singing, in this context, through effects, as if he\u2019s making an emergency phone call from the wreckage of some digital shanty-town.<\/p>\n

Over the last decade, however, things had broken down between Hewlett and Albarn, and there seemed something a little formulaic about the last few Gorillaz albums: they served up some decent slices of global pop with some marquee names, but without much synergy between the artwork and the music, and no grand concepts of the kind that united 2010\u2019s Plastic Beach.<\/p>\n

After 2023\u2019s Cracker Island, Albarn suggested that Gorillaz were in need of \u201ca paradigm shift\u201d, and their ninth studio album provides that. Instead of a series of discrete, bite-sized TV shows, The Mountain is an epic, banquet-sized movie. <\/p>\n

It retains the musical universe familiar from previous Gorillaz albums \u2013 American singers, Latino rappers, English pop eccentrics, African and Middle Eastern multi-instrumentalists \u2013 but the setting here shifts to India. A recurring cast of Hindustani classical musicians provide much of the background, while the lyrics are inspired by Hindu notions of Samsara and the life cycle, dominated by themes of death and rebirth.<\/p>\n

Part of the reason why Albarn and Hewlett are once again tight and simpatico is because they were united by grief after a triptych of deaths: Hewlett\u2019s mother-in-law\u2019s death in 2023 was followed by his father\u2019s death in 2024, just 10 days after Albarn lost his own father.<\/p>\n

Albarn senior, incidentally, had a life that was almost as interesting as his son\u2019s: an inspirational art course leader, whose students included Adam Ant, Malcolm McLaren, Peter Greenaway and Ian Dury, he briefly managed Soft Machine and curated dozens of art exhibitions and \u201chappenings\u201d around Swinging London.<\/p>\n

Like many 1960s counterculturalists, he also had a long-term obsession with Indian music and culture, which feeds into this album. Several tracks even serve as eulogies for him. \u201cYour legacy frightens me,\u201d we hear on \u201cOrange County\u201d, while \u201cThe Sweet Prince\u201d seems to narrate Keith Albarn\u2019s last moments. \u201cSweet prince, don\u2019t be sad\/You were never meant to be here\u201d, Damon sings over Anoushka Shankar\u2019s tumbling sitar flourishes and Johnny Marr\u2019s jangling guitar. Here the syringe that administers palliative painkilling injections becomes a sword which \u201cwill set you on your patterned path into the next life\u201d.<\/p>\n

In keeping with the spirit of death and resurrection, Albarn has also mined his archive to find unused vocal snippets from now-deceased Gorillaz guest singers.<\/p>\n

In this world, death is not the end. Bobby Womack\u2019s soulful croon and Dave Jolicoeur\u2019s abstract couplets are reanimated for \u201cThe Moon Cave\u201d; Mark E Smith\u2019s glorious gibberish about \u201cpeg-legged slave traders\u201d and \u201cshrunken China heads\u201d serves as the chorus to \u201cDelirium\u201d; Tony Allen intoning \u201cwe are ready\u201d in Yoruba introduces \u201cThe Hardest Thing\u201d; while Dennis Hopper\u2019s distinctive raspy tone provides the name of the LP. Proof, a rapper from Eminem\u2019s Detroit collective D12, was shot dead in 2006, but his contribution to \u201cThe Manifesto\u201d, recorded 25 years ago, sees him almost narrating his own murder. \u201cBeefing with your blocks\/That you\u2019re creeping with your Glock\/Now you\u2019re sleeping in a box\u201d, he declaims, over a woozy, Dilla-style waltz and some drunken funereal horns.<\/p>\n

Even the newly recorded guest vocalists concentrate on themes of mortality. Sharing bars with Proof on \u201cThe Manifesto\u201d is the 23-year-old Argentine rapper Trueno \u2013 he\u2019s rapping in Spanish but his verse, translated in the sleevenotes, is an astonishingly poetic invocation of the life cycle (\u201cI crossed the threshold and today I feel free\u2026 only my feats, my virtue and my feeling accompany me\/To live chapter two of this tale\u201d). Gruff Rhys ends \u201cThe Shadowy Light\u201d with the lines \u201cI shed my skin\/The end is the beginning\u201d; Black Thought from The Roots sprays out several verbose rhymes throughout, ruminating on the final track that: \u201cEven if they let me into Heaven I would probably just move back soon\u201d.<\/p>\n

But the sonic signature of The Mountain remains the core group of classical Indian musicians \u2013 sitar virtuoso Anoushka Shankar, bansuri flautist Ajay Prasanna, tabla player Viraj Acharya and sarod-playing brothers Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash \u2013 as well the nine-piece Mountain Choir.<\/p>\n

Even the most English-sounding track here \u2013 the drunken, clanking, Jerry Dammers-inspired ska of \u201cThe God Of Lying\u201d, featuring a deadpan vocal by Joe Talbot from Idles \u2013 comes wreathed in tablas and bansuri flute, like a Bollywood take on \u201cClint Eastwood\u201d from the first Gorillaz album.<\/p>\n

The ecstatic Arabic blip-hop of \u201cDamascus\u201d sees Syrian singer Omar Souleyman and Yasiin Bey (the artist formerly known as Mos Def) trading verses over the pulsating percussion of Viraj Acharya. \u201cThe Manifesto\u201d started off with a simple Latin preset on one of Albarn\u2019s vintage home organs and it would have worked perfectly if set to a dembow-style reggaeton beat, but it piles on so many Indian rhythms that it morphs \u2013 quite brilliantly \u2013 into a piece of heavy bhangra.<\/p>\n

And the pulsating synth pop of \u201cThe Shadowy Light\u201d is transformed by Bollywood legend Asha Bhosle, now aged 92, with a lyric that sees her welcoming the process of death (\u201ccome, oh boatman, lower my boat into still waters\/And take me, finally, to the other side\u201d, she trills, in Hindi).<\/p>\n

Just as this threatens to look like gap-year fetishisation of brown spirituality, the Kraftwerkian \u201cThe Plastic Guru\u201d serves as a welcome rejoinder \u2013 an account of Albarn and Hewlett\u2019s Beatles-like visit to an ashram in Rishikesh, where they quickly grew suspicious of their assigned swami (\u201cstarring in your own show and selling your snake oil\u201d).<\/p>\n

Bleepy analogue synths and a jabbering four-to-the-bar piano are slowly drenched in multi-tracked sitars and the massed ranks of an Indian ceremonial band, as if to desperately assert the guru\u2019s credentials. False idols also dominate the infectiously catchy \u201cThe Happy Dictator\u201d, where Ron and Russell Mael from Sparks invoke the spirit of insane autocrats, like Kim Il-sung, whose rule is eternal, even after their death.<\/p>\n

Albarn has, of course, explored grief on many occasions \u2013 Gorillaz\u2019s \u201cAndromeda\u201d, Blur\u2019s \u201cThe Ballad\u201d and the title track to his solo album The Nearer The Fountain\u2026 are all mournful elegies to departed friends and loved ones; countless other Blur and Gorillaz songs mourn the death of relationships. You would expect an entire album with death at its central theme to be similarly hymnal, sombre and funereal, but The Mountain somehow manages to be none of these things. Its 15 tracks are filled with cheery major-key singalongs, sitar-soaked synth-pop bangers and whimsical waltzes that serve as ecstatic celebrations of life, rebirth and reinvention.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The post Gorillaz\u2019 The Mountain reviewed: death, rebirth and reinvention<\/a> appeared first on UNCUT<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In TV they talk of the \u201canthology series\u201d: a regular, recurring show, like The Twilight Zone, Tales Of The Unexpected, Inside No.9 or Black Mirror, where each episode has a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,750,88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-album","category-gorillaz","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8751\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}