Gorillaz – ‘The Mountain’ album review: A mere messy mixtape
When you’ve got a little black boot of contacts, as densely populated as Damon Albarn’s, why wouldn’t you exercise it in your latest musical project? That’s the question I am asking myself when listening to Gorillaz’ latest effort The Mountain, because ultimately, I think I would do the same, but there are two key differences: I am a music fan, not a musician, and this is not an album, it’s a mixtape.
The Skinny: Albarn, along with his Gorillaz collaborator, Jamie Hewlett, have reached a rightly earned point in their careers where they can go into the studio and almost explore any idea they see fit. After all, they’ve garnered a reputation of being brave electronic innovators. But it feels like within that privilege comes a slight complacency: any idea has become every idea, and every idea has become a reason to call in, well, everyone.
Bobby Womack, Sparks, Jalen Ngonda, Tony Allen, Idles, Johnny Marr, and the late Mark E Smith are genuinely just a few of the names who feature on this sprawling record of ideas that span nearly every part of the musical globe. Of course, Albarn’s experience as a genre-crossing musician provides a base level of skill and nuance that makes each individual song well executed and devoid of cringeworthy pastiche that this brand of global experimentalism might otherwise provoke.
However, while the result might not be a damp squib attempt at collaborative experimentalism, it is the sound of a middle-of-the-road mixtape. On ‘The Hardest Part’ and ‘Orange County’, you can see there this is a genuine attempt to stitch ideas together through Albarn’s narrative. But the muffled use of autotune feels inherently less cutting edge and dystopic than it did on early Gorillaz material.
Ultimately, the autotune motif turns out to be less of a stitch and more of a loose thread. Each track feels somewhat muddled, like a collection of strangers bundled together under the commonality of a themed fancy dress party.
This is also a deeply personal album for Albarn. The narrative was largely driven by the death of his father, which feels distinctly visceral on ‘Orange County’, a triumphant showcasing of his continued ability to write a resonant melody, but it’s those peaks that make the troughs of this record so frustrating. it glimmers then another stranger joins the conversation. Strip everything back and leave Albarn and Hewlett to pursue these ideas individually, and the record would have been stunning.
If any collaborator should stay, it’s Anoushka Shankar, daughter of sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. When Hewlett and Albarn match their beat composition with her sitar playing, they dive into something transcendental that backs the spiritual mining of this entire album, while similarly fitting the melancholy of Albarn’s mournful voice. But ultimately, her contribution proves to be a moment of perfect alignment amid middling mishmash.
The verdict: The crux of the record’s inspiration is its most treasured asset, and the worst parts are when you get distracted from that core. Like any good mixtape, this is a lengthy project, but like any bad album, it’s a sprawling mess that goes on too long and explores one too many tangents. Essentially, there are three different records in here that would have all made for enjoyable listens had they been separated properly. It’s a bad outfit made up of good clothes.
Standout track: ‘Orange County’
Release Date: February 27th, 2025 | Producer: Gorillaz, James Ford, Samuel Egglenton and Remi Kabaka Jr | Label: Kong
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