ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Damon Albarn: The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows (Transgressive)
★★★★
You just might be dazzled by the Blur frontman’s new, hall-of-mirrors solo work
The unwieldy title of Damon Albarn’s third solo album is taken from a line of poetry by 19th-century rural wordsmith John Clare. Indeed, the title track compresses and modernises Clare’s “Love and Memory”, a meditation on grief and the indifference of nature set to a burbling brook of synth and strings, conjuring a gauzy, amorphous demi-song awash adrift in waves of melancholy.
That opening paragraph alone should be enough to confirm the status of Albarn as a soft southern poseur to anyone still fighting the Britpop wars.
For those for whom the dust has long since settled on Blur vs Oasis chart battles, this strange and extraordinary work should serve as further proof that Albarn is Britain’s most creative shapeshifting music-maker since David Bowie.
Over an extraordinarily diverse career, the multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter has recorded 27 albums with a dozen different ensembles, including operas and soundtracks. If you want Albarn the pop communicator, you will have to sample early Blur or cartoon ensemble Gorillaz. For angry attack, try The Good, the Bad and the Queen; for world fusion, dip into multifarious Africa Express projects. Under his solo guise, rather than revealing the genius behind many masks, he has tended to place interior ruminations that don’t quite belong elsewhere. Interestingly, Clare himself was a man trapped between worlds, son of a farm labourer whose bucolic verse located the spiritual in everyday life. He was an outsider, scorned by much of the literary establishment of the time but determined to carve his own idiosyncratic course. Albarn repurposes Clare’s borrowed phrase throughout the album, as an evocation of grief (on the title track), desire (on
Royal Morning Blue) and hope (on Particles).
Albarn’s own lyrics remain as inscrutable as ever, dotted with opaque personal references and colliding the poetic with the clunkingly awkward. “Cross dressers of these terrible roads/ Your love is great/ And the nasalar
[sic]/ In his beat up car/ Is taking the particles back home again.” What can it all mean? Write your answers on a postcard addressed to William S Burroughs then cut it up and rearrange it in any order you like. But Albarn’s great gift is to pluck sweet melodies and flowing grooves from the shape of the music itself. The Cormorant
sweeps the listener to sea in tides of oceanic strangeness, The Tower of Montevideo writhes into a ghostly tango, the spiny two-note bass of
Polaris guides listeners to the comforts of home.
The album began life as a commission to create music reflecting the stark landscapes of the Londoner’s second home in Reykjavik (Albarn has become an Icelandic citizen, to escape the strictures of Brexit), and you can hear the afterwash in a patina of found sound and quirky instrumental interludes of an improvising orchestra. When lockdown put paid to the original commission, Albarn redeployed the soundscapes as a basis for weirdly misshapen songs of imaginary travel and emotional return.
The Nearer the Fountain may be Albarn’s most intimate, understated and impenetrable work yet. But if you are prepared to get lost in his selfinvolved hall of mirrors, you might just find yourself beautifully bedazzled.
Neil Mccormick