To the moon cave where I bought my tears

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

06/03/26 : The Mountain - Gorillaz

Our fourth visit with Gorillaz (who I still struggle to forgive for what they did when they headlined Glastonbury), which somewhat surprises me - but not as much as the chart position at which we find ourselves. More on this later...

Hmmm. Well. Considering each track singly, there's at least something to admire - there are varied interesting "ethnic" elements and rhythms combined with more "modern" styles and instruments, often with a quirky guest artist involved, giving an interesting sound (if not necessarily a particularly loveable one). But, to my uncultured ear at least, whilst there is obvious variety between the tracks, they all follow the same pattern - a dirge-y male voice (usually, but certainly not always Damon) accompanied by something odd like a Tibetan nose-flute, a Honduran ear-trumpet or a Polynesian arse-ocarina. So it all gets very tiresome and that's before you get anywhere near the 66 minutes of the whole album - I really don't see the appeal.

We're at a (for me) very surprising #1 in the charts with a new entry this week - who exactly is buying Gorillaz albums these days? The rest of the top five are Olivia Dean (of course), Bruno Mars (another new entry), Mitski (another new entry, again surprisingly high for me) and PinkPantheress (a re-entry) - so let's check out those (and other) new entries...

Bruno Mars (#3)
Bruno is someone I admire without particularly enjoying (with the obviously exception of "Uptown Funk", but I'm giving that one to Mark Ronson). And, after a brief listen, there's nothing here to convince me otherwise - but I admit it's well done.

Mitski (#4)
I'm not a huge Mitski fan, but this is easily the album I most looked forward to checking out this week. And yeah, I liked it - it's wry observational country-tinged stuff which reminded me of Jenny Lewis and Aimee Mann and she's got a lovely voice.

Blackpink (#11)
There's nothing wrong with this if you like that Blackpink sound, but imho five tracks does not an album make, so I refuse to accept this as a valid chart entry.

Paul McCartney & Wings (#35)
This is a selection of random Wings songs, with the only point of interest being that it's linked to a documentary about Paul and the band, which I can imagine is an entertaining (and accidentally amusing) watch.

Rob Zombie (#81)
Only our second ever mention of Mr Zombie - he's not someone I know anything about but given he's called his album The Great Satan, I have a sneaking suspicion it's not really my sort of thing. And it isn't.

Feeder (#82)
This is a live version of their '02 release Comfort In Sound, which is highly regarded but not one I've previously listened to. So I was surprised to recognise "Just The Way I'm Feeling" and "Forget About Tomorrow" - I knew I liked both tracks but doubt I could have told you they were by Feeder. And the rest of the album is a similar vein - I liked it. 

PinkPantheress is obviously the highest re-entry - I assume her Brit Award for Producer Of The Year is responsible (I'm not entirely sure what you have to do to win that, but she's the first woman to do so, so I'm pleased for her). The Brits will also be responsible for Rosalia (#37) who is the next highest, but I've no idea why The 1975 (#40) are also back. Last week I said that Mumford & Sons would be at #16, so I'm taking #20 as a victory -  I can't say I feel that Gorillaz deserve it but I suspect they will do something similar, so let's go for #16 again. And this week's Taylor stats are one in the top thirty and a mere four in the entire chart, with Lover precariously poised at #100.

Wikipedia has way more than I was expecting on the album (278 milliPeppers) and it tells us it's their ninth album and the text on the album cover is in Devanagari, which I'm sure you know is an Indic script noteworthy for being a unicameral alphabet (which means there's only the one case) and used for many languages across the Indian subcontinent. Thematically, the album focuses on death, grief and the afterlife (which I missed) because Damon & Jamie both lost family members during its production. It has quite the list of guest artists including Johnny Marr, Idles, Anoushka Shankar, Sparks and Yasin Bey and also features posthumous appearances by previous collaborators including Dennis Hopper, Bobby Womach, Mark E Smith and Proof.

It also tells us there's an accompanying video which is an 8 minute animated video which is entirely hand drawn, so took 18 months to create - which is somehow both impressive and completely pointless. Critically, of course, the album was loved because Damon can do no wrong for them lads but commercially I was surprised at how well it's done globally, making the top three in quite a few countries and getting to #1 in Belgium and Ireland.

discogs.com tells us you're going to have to spend £25 to get a double CD or vinyl copy but if you want the white label vinyl version you're going to have to shell out £380.45. I'm loathe to slag this album off because there's obviously been a lot of thought and work gone into it - but just because someone's worked hard at something doesn't automatically mean it's good. Each to their own I guess but I can't help but be suspicious that a lot of people "like" this because they're told they should. So Mitski and Feeder take the album of the week award for me - they're very different offerings but they're both very listenable with enough variety to keep you engaged.

27/02/26 - Yeah, I liked this