NEW ALBUMS

Captain Albarn and First Mate Simonon set sail again for England, a once happy place now on the brink of collapse. By Danny Eccleston. Illustration by Thomas Moore.

The Good, The Bad & The Queen return, Richard Swift’s goodbye, Bill Ryder-Jones yawns, Thom Yorke soundtracks.

The Good, The Bad & The Queen ★★★★ Merrie Land PARLOPHONE. CD/DL/LP

ENGLAND: DAMON Albarn can’t leave it. This “stroppy little island of mixed-up people” who don’t know how mixed-up they are or that mixed-up maybe isn’t such a bad thing to be. The “stroppy” line is from Three Changes, a song on Albarn’s previous album as primus inter pares in The Good, The Bad & The Queen. The construction of that record began proteanly, with the Blur/ Gorillaz singer and veteran Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen making what they initially imagined would be Afrocentric music, except Albarn’s songs and his other collaborators – Simon Tong of The Verve and Erland & The Carnival, and Paul Simonon, who needs no introduction here – seemed to draw the album closer to home, to tower blocks and gasholders, to London, its ghosts and history. The result was a spooky song cycle unlike any music he’d previously made, pinned to landmarks like Westbourne Park’s Lord Hill’s Bridge, but as adrift as the Northern Whale that finds itself stranded halfway up the Thames in the song of that name. Albarn’s specific interest in British, but largely English, themes and characters first surfaced during work on Blur’s second album, 1993’s Modern Life Is Rubbish. It was urgently presented by the group, in their music and iconography, as an alternative to the wave of American rock that was swamping – to use a charged word – homegrown alternative culture. It seemed a perverse gambit, referencing The Kinks and Madness, Sunday lunch and sugary tea at such a juncture, but it found traction, and other British bands rediscovered their parochial pop traditions in Albarn’s wake. By the time Blur’s Parklife album hit the top of the UK’s albums chart in May 1994, what was melancholy and/or satirical in Albarn’s visions of Albion were already being drowned out by overtones of triumphalism. Britpop had arrived. Albarn’s subsequent cringe at this outcome led to retreat: to Iceland, to Africa, into periods of narcotic and musical exploration, and his return to the idea of England was gradual, speeded by the first TGTB&TQ incarnation in 2007 and elements of his excellent 2011 music for an opera about Tudor alchemist Dr Dee, plus, arguably, Gorillaz, whom he has occasionally described as an attempt to resurrect that most English of pop groups, The Fun Boy Three. But while TGTB&TQ began in Africa with a loose agenda, Merrie Land began in Blackpool with Albarn heartsick from the Brexit vote and aftermath, and that sense of a nation on the brink of something transformational, perhaps terrible, animates a much darker, weirder record, a pagan dance around a dense core of Albarn’s observations and, unusually for him, explicit politics. In the final verse of the title track, he interrogates the pro-Brexit shotgun marriage of the Tory right and Northern working class, singing, “You were the ones who work together/Put the money in the pockets/Of the few and their fortunes/Who crowd the school benches/And jeer at us all because they don’t care about us/They are graceless and you shouldn’t be with them.” Don’t mince your words, Damon. Around him swirls a kind of sickly fairground music, more freeform than Merrie Land’s poppier predecessor. Tony Allen’s skittery drums break up the lines; guitarist Tong delivers disembodied atmospherics; Simonon’s bass pulse provides dubby underpinning. There are recorders, echoes of the Beggar’s Opera and – in Last Man To Leave – the Threepenny one. Over repeated listens it starts to cohere, yet in parts it’s jarring and genuinely nightmarish – as in The Great Fire, where skeletonarmy reggae clambers over Albarn, declaiming from the proscenium arch about a delusional land opiated on aspirational plastic surgery and “Alcoholism disguised with a balloon or two/On Preston station.” Albarn is wary that this could smack of condescension – he’s been accused of it before. He’d rather we see it as a situation we’re all responsible for – a family tearing itself apart for reasons that are jumbled, hard to pick apart. One of the problems is an idea of a historically British or English culture that is itself a dream, lost in time. Albarn references some of its ancient touchstones – traditions like the Maypole (in Ribbons) and, in The Truce Of Twilight, the ‘Horned Ooser’ – a monstrous man-bull mask that featured in West Country revels – and more recent ones: the Empire Windrush; fly-tipping; Demis Roussos singing Forever. His ability as a songwriter to wring sad beauty from such jetsam is unbested – Lady Boston is this record’s central jewel, a lilting litany of “seagull” and “castle” and “cliff edge” and “joy” that ends with a Welsh choir singing “Dwi wrth dy gefn” – roughly “I’m on the back of you”, or in other words, we’re all in this together. It’s up there with the most evocative attempts by British pop to interpret its locality: Penny Lane, Waterloo Sunset, Ghost Town, This Is England, Blur’s This Is A Low. Albarn’s new visions are similarly vivid, but if he hopes they’ll prove instructive – that Merrie Land turns out to be a blow, even glancing, in the cause of a second Brexit referendum, which he fervently supports – he shouldn’t get too excited. On paper, his English icons are neutral players, and appeals to inchoate concepts of nation can be made to serve many masters. Albarn’s England is one built on waves of immigrants, and his European Union a prize wrested from centuries of European warfare, but he’s not spelling it out to quite that degree. Would we want him to? Such things are generally beyond the reach of pop music. Merrie Land begins as a pilgrimage – with a reading from Chaucer, culled from Powell & Pressburger’s 1944 movie A Canterbury Tale – and ends in the pretty, organ-tickling swoon of The Poison Tree with reference to “a last crusade to save me from myself”. A pilgrimage and a crusade – big words suggesting a search for, or hope of, salvation. There’s not much of either in here. But if any art is currently encapsulating the sense of ‘wrongness’ abroad in our land, this is it.

“A pagan dance around a dense core of Albarn’s observations and some explicit politics.”