Damon Albarn
Everyday Robots
April 28 2014 (Parlophone)
8/10
Words: Alison Mack
The release of Damon Albarn’s debut solo album, has been hard to avoid taking note of as the former Britpop lad's mug has been virtually everywhere. Okay, so it's his first solo, and recorded at Studio 13, his own West London studio, so no roughing it involved, or trekking off on some six-week label-funded jolly in LA. It is also said to be his most personal and autobiographical, lyrically, to date; despite his African quests, Gorillaz cartoon fantasies and two operas, still little has shown the real D.A. We know there's been plenty going on, vis-à-vis his digging out the highs and lows of his heroin addiction in recent droves, but does this 46 minute, 12 track work enlighten us further?
The answer to that is both yes and no. For the most part there are oblique references and hints rather than out-and-out big reveals, but given that XL boss Richard Russell was the instigator of - and subsequently, producer of - the album, there may have been a slight prompting in the direction of a solo work ad opposed to any sudden desire of Albarn alone to bare his soul for public scrutiny and dissection. But here we are, and here it is: an observational record of past, present and future.
It's not just in the written passages that there are moments quite delightful in their subtle, yet sometimes indefinable, way, the melodies too have been honed to the nth degree. Both have within them to draw the listener in, almost as if in a private confessional.
The eerie lone violin loop and pensive sadness of the piano notes of opening title track that depicts our technology age of beings that "just touch thumbs/stricken in a status sea", being one such that tugs at the heart and mind both. Likewise, the sublime chorus that brings the nostalgic 'Hostiles' to a close, as the summation to its partnership of delicate keys and synths against lyric lines like, "When your body aches from the unsolved dreams you keep/and the hours pass by, just left on repeat/It’ll be a silent day I share with you, fighting off the hostiles with whom we collude."
The melodic structure on tracks like the piano-led 'The Selfish Giant' - with harmonic collaboration courtesy Bat For Lashes' Natasha Khan - 'Lonely Press Play', 'You & Me' are highlight points. The latter, in particular, a seven-minute track that gets to the heart of the matter of romantic interludes with Elastica's Justine Frischmann and the darker days of their mutual heroin use: "digging out a hole in Westbourne Grove/Tin foil and a lighter, the ship across/five days on and two off".
Another album collaborator is Brian Eno, who lends input to the aforementioned on the steel drums of the lament 'You & Me' and also 'Heavy Seas Of Love'; on the former, by way of the silky synths, while the hymnal latter - a paean to Albarn's Devon coastal retreat, and a song on which Eno also shares co-writing credits - finds him providing the baritone lullaby, along with Leytonstone City Mission Choir,
'Lonely Press Play', comes in the album's first half, and with looping percussion, jazz-funk feel and a low-key soul-enhanced vocal, it is both downcast yet seemingly still holding out hope. The track that it is followed by could not be more different in style or tempo. 'Mr Tembo', inspired by a baby elephant he encountered on a trip to a Tanzanian nature reserve, and which was originally a song composed for his daughter, it is a folk gospel tinged song that has Albarn plucking at a ukulele strings in an uplifting shuffle.
'Everyday Robots' may transpire to be the oeuvre to a yet more telling and complex story that Albarn has to tell. This work is not so much that of z man in the throes of a midlife crisis, but one in his middle years now taking stock of all that has gone before.
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