Damon Albarn - The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows
Considering his membership of Blur, Gorillaz and The Good The Bad & The Queen, his steering of the Africa Express collective and collaborative busyness, it’s easy to forget that Damon Albarn’s CV also includes a solo album. Now, seven years on from Everyday Robots, he’s finally found time for a (very different) follow-up.
The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows is short, at just 39 minutes, and based on recording sessions in an Icelandic studio, where Albarn directed musicians to "play the landscape" outside. The ensuing pandemic meant he was left to work up those rough sketches into almost one year later.
It’s a big stretch to call these pop songs: they’re more suggestive compositions with improv roots, shaped by piano, detailed with synths, delicate strings and jazzy saxophone undertones and, when they’re not drifting in the ether, anchored by machine-drum beats.
Ineffable sadness has the upper hand, but there’s a span of moods and styles: the exquisitely billowing 'Esja' is the most abstract, and 'Combustion', which marries anxious sax squawking to a galumphing rhythm, then introduces a pretty, cocktail-bar piano refrain, the most perverse. Somewhere in between lie 'Darkness To Light', whose forlornly twinkling melody and shuffling beats recall Badly Drawn Boy, and the winnowing, Robert Wyatt-like 'The Cormorant'. Throughout, Albarn’s vocals work their sweet, touchingly bereft charm.
Out now. Label: Transgressive