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What the title track of The Good, The Bad and
The Queen means It’s the end of the road, the final track, and the end of an emotionally turbulent album. After the aching nostalgic sadness of Green Fields, the lovely track which precedes it, it feels as if the battle is finally over and singer Damon Albarn is about to make some sort of peace. But the tentative vibrato soon switches to a less jolly, doom-laden piano refrain, rising and falling and rising again. It belongs in a church, not a pub, but there’s no sense of any religious uplift to be found here. At the sixty second mark, a light swing of the drums and the pulse of the bass signal the arrival of the vocals. The faintest strum of electric guitar stirs quietly in the background. For the first time on the album the tone of Damon Albarn’s vocal isn’t, sad or frightened. In this “blessed routine for the Good, the Bad and the Queen”, the whole band for once seem relaxed and positive, almost. Starting with it's opening track History Song, the album has thus far swum in a violent mix of psychedelic nightmare and occasional pastoral loveliness. From the very start, moments of melancholic beauty have been spiked by a sense of urban dread. Disorientating echoes of dub revolve and swirl in their own juices no matter how pretty the tune, leaving the listener with the feeling of unsettled emotions being explored. Now, as the album is about to come to its close, there is at last the threat of a single, clear direction. The unstoppable dominant piano phrase simply goes on and on, and so does life, Damon Albarn and his British supergroup drawn from Blur, The Verve, Gorillaz, and The Clash, seem to be saying, no matter how bad. Ho hum. At the two-minute mark the vocal passage of the song ends abruptly with a strained “come” by Albarn. With the final “oohs”, the pace suddenly starts to pick up. The guitar strumming has risen to the surface and it's getting grungier and faster by the second. By a long way the rawest, and by no means the best, track on the album, this atypical approach by Damon Albarn and his accomplished team of hired hands fufills a vital function. On a collection bursting with every shade of instrumentation except traditional lead rock guitar, Simon Tong is now as loud in the mix as Tony Allen and his cymbal-heavy drums or Paul Simenon and his bass. Thus far, producer Danger Mouse has applied a colourful palette of dub effects, synth sounds, acoustic guitar, piano, strings and choirs with such sparing precision that only one track (Three Changes) has managed to edge over the four minute mark, the rest reaching a natural conclusion in three minutes or under. That’s all gone out the window now. Everything in this album’s seemingly sprawling but actually tightly constructed sonic tapestry is becoming fast and sloppy. The chug-a-chug, stop-start guitar is growing fuzzier and more manic by the second. Just when you think it’s on top, the piano returns to prominence at the four minute thirty-five mark to pick up the pace even further. Fifteen seconds later, the guitar fights back, wailing away wildly, fingers racing up and down the fretboard. Every time this track seems to be on the verge of knowing where it's going, something throws it off balance again. The song is speeding away from its own players, growing and disintegrating at the same time, one giant, glorious, amateurish mess. But this is no throwaway, lets let our hair down, disposable moment. The almost music hall piano sound on this track is the same one that appeared on A Soldier’s Tale two tracks earlier and Herculean three tracks before that and Kingdom of Doom one track earlier. . . It’s is no accident that the album seems to be unravelling at the end of an otherwise thematically consistent body of songs where hope fights with disappointment at every turn. It’s been a battle from the start, its themes have been clear in sound and words. War and violence turn up in the lyrics of six songs, the state of the nation or the world in four. In contrast to all this violence, lyrical allusions to nature and the elements also abound. Reference after reference to hills and green fields and the sun. On tracks such as Green Fields and Behind The Sun, these clearly represent happier times for Damon, childhood memories, moments of hope before the war. The Iraq war. Elsewhere, the glories of the great outdoors are thoroughly outnumbered by nature's darker side, however. More often than not Damon sings of being assaulted by storms and seas, engulfed by waves, blown about by the wind, washed away, deprived of ballast. Steeped in a rich melancholy matched by the richness of its musical sounds, the name of this album The Good, The Bad and The Queen adds up to more than a bad pun on the Sergio Leone spaghetti western movie. There’s the good, there’s the bad and then there’s The Queen; someone entirely different who represents something more than the everyday, The Establishment, the ‘nation’, that thing beyond Damon’s, or anybody’s, control in good old Britain. The Good, The Bad and The Queen is the work of a man trying to find his footing, a weary soldier looking back on defeat, a protester whose views have unfortunately failed to swing the argument. He's someone searching for hope on a “stroppy little island of mixed up people” (Three Changes). The problem is, he no longer shares much affinity with them. He hoped his fellow citizens would do better than accepting the way the modern world is today, putting up with the Iraq War. At five minutes four seconds strings appear for the first time. At five minutes thirty-four seconds the piano hits a new, higher note, this swirling mess is going nowhere. A frenzied, mad struggle is going on here expressed in more obvious and brutal tones than the preceding eleven tracks, where dazzling production work stitches together a melting pot of different sounds with such skill you feel lifted by its brilliance even as the pendulum swing of Damon Albarn's emotions leave you a bit battered and bruised. Or is it the drink?, something you turn to in distress, something Albarn certainly leans on throughout the album’s journey. Such small songs but so much going on. Whimsy turning to depression, bitterness to beauty, a noodly dance synth line cutting to a posh, angelic choir. Slightly twisted 1950s doo-wop on 80's Life followed by slinky funk-pop on Northern Whale. This album, like its title track, never stays in one place for very long. It's complex yet it's still pop and it's this which ultimately makes The Good, The Bad and The Queen the single greatest piece of work produced by a British band since Radiohead's OK Computer ten years ago.
It's as if Damon has taken everything from his all influences and his own
previous work, thrown it all in the air and then caught only the pieces that
fit absolutely.
Truly English in a greater way than The Kinks' The Village Green
Preservation Society (1968) which says more about Ray Davies' state of mind
than the socio-cultural title may suggest. A cinematic landscape of town and country, mind and external reality, with pretty little tunes and destabilising sound-effects, only Simenon's bassline provides a common thread, snaking its way through the album like the Thames through London. The Good, The Bad and The Queen is far from a mood album such as Talk Talk’s stately and philosophical song cycle form Spirit of Eden (1988), as some have tried to damn it with faint praise. There are too many pop hooks and memorable melodies for that. On the other hand, no matter how tightly constructed by producer Danger Mouse, almost every track dribbles out with brief snatches of jumbled instrumentation or return unexpectedly with a spot of random noise after they appear to have finished. It's the same “civilisation out of control” theme of 1997’s OK Computer, though Albarn chooses to present this ‘post-modern’ theme as part of the sonic fabric rather than in the forefront lyrically. The end results are more positive than Thom Yorke’s most recent solo work, The Eraser (2006) which shares the same sense of despair at England’s ‘decline’ (check out the cover where the same skyline of a beleaguered London that’s in flames on The Good, The Bad and The Queen’s sleeve is here under a deluge of catastrophic waves). Despite Albarn’s sometimes maudlin vocals, he’s a more humane talent than Yorke whose obsession with alienation sometimes makes him sound simply alienated. What makes The Good, The Bad and The Queen different and, in some ways, better, in practice than it sounds on paper is that it is far from some pampered middle-aged leftwinger's vehicle for political propaganda against Bush and Blair and the ‘war on terror’. It's not just about ideas and principles. It's an emotional and personal piece, written and arranged from the heart as much as the head. Damon has clearly learnt from those Blur and Britpop days, his semi-successful attempts at art-rock on Essex Dogs from 1997's eponymous album or Battle from 1999's 13, the more successful marriage of art and pop on Blur’s last album to date, Think Tank (2003). Not to forget his immersion in world music with Mali Music in 2002, when he first worked with drummer Tony Allen, or his successful forays into modern dance-pop scene with Gorillaz, the virtual cartoon outfit he formed with Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett in 1998. Dazzlingly musically multi-cultural in a way Blur never were and never could be, on The Good, The Bad and The Queen, Damon Albarn takes the slight fun fair/British music hall feel he dipped into on Parklife and the nightmarish circus ring instrumental Theme From Retro from Blur and employs it in a coherent, intensified fashion. Those little burbling beeps of synth that pepper his hits with Gorillaz are back on this album but not as some hit factory novelty device. On this record on every occasion, they serve to express a state of mind or emotion. A subtlely powerful album about being powerless, The Good, The Bad and The Queen may express disappointment bit it’s not the work of a cynical or defeated man. As the title track races away into its final seconds, struggling for lift-off beyond any natural gravity, piano pounding, guitars shrieking, you can hear bits of the musical past flying through the air in the midst of the cacophony. Music Hall, Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, Bowie, punk, reggae, Blur even. At 6mins 10sec, just as the song is threatening to do itself serious damage - and it made for a great finale on their live UK tour of unusual venues a year ago where the songs acquired greater colour and strength live - it ends suddenly with a perfunctory thud of the piano and a little rattle of the tambourine. Only to be followed by a further 48 seconds of faintly-heard brief snatches of jumbled instrumentation. Well, it had to finish on a random note, no resolution was ever going to be possible. Albarn doesn’t really believe the world is ending because of the Iraq War, it just feels like it. The apocalyptical nature of some of the lyrics and occasional desperate pleas over the state of his "aching soul" (80's Life) demonstrate the depth of his feelings, he’s not really encouraging listeners to opt out and settle for negativity - that’s what the title track is saying in sound, if not words. That’s the function the title track fulfils in its ungainly, sometimes ugly grandeur. Dejected but not cynical, the fight is still going on at the climax of The Good, The Bad and The Queen.
The bonkers piano line and ugly guitar noises refuse to back down. The
energy to keep trying is still there.
The song may not have achieved lift-off and may never do but the effort is a
glorious one.
As the waves crash and wind howls, there is no surrender in the Kingdom of
Doom.
The battle is still going on between what Albarn sees as the good and the
bad and not forgetting the Queen, obviously. © Modern Music Review (2008) |
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