Everyday Robots –
Damon Albarn
It has been a long road already from the smartarse blonde
smirks on so many old Blur publicity photos.
Damon Albarn has worn a plurality of hats since then, and carried off
nearly all of them well. There were
latter-day Blur albums of increasing complexity; a Gorillaz phase of
laptophilia, and quite a few other cul-de-sacs of published material. What’s more, basically all of it has been
pretty, or better: remaining both fun and
interesting despite the escalating tariffs paid to maturity.
While no one portion of this output could quite be accused
of immortality and greatness, that fate now is now unavoidably assigned to the
burgeoning sum of Albarn’s career.
Post-Blur, the albums have been of uniformly humble scope—sometimes playful,
sometimes gloomy, but generally always modest.
But his combined output has nonetheless achieved in total a stature of
rare importance. All of us should be
listening when this man strikes a chord.
The latest album, Albarn’s Everyday Robots, has made the point both irrefutable and permanent.
Of course “Everyday” would have to be the descriptor. Nose-down and busy, if not precisely
humble, has generally been the Albarn rule of the road since back in the
Britpop days. It wasn’t Blur who were
declaring their instruments Touched By God(s) back then; it wasn’t Blur staging
nutties for the press. Blur were just
writing hooks, acting a tad smug and, eventually, tearing a bit at the seams of
their expanding skill sets and creative horizons. They were, clearly, the everyday
robots. This isn’t Kid A or OK Computer, and
not all robots are threats or tragedies.
Nor are they heroes.
In the traditional sense, anyway:
We are everyday robots on our
phones
In the process of getting home;
Looking like standing stones,
Out there on our own.
The remainder of the leadoff track, which share’s the
album’s title, reiterates the mundane realities of this latest tech
reassessment. We, the robots are “in the
process of being sold,” or “driving in adjacent cars,” or just “getting old.”
By second track “Hostiles,” Albarn has alighted very close
to the terrain he introduced on the self-titled The Good, The Bad and The Queen project a few years ago. The beat schleps and shuffles. The percussion touches are clearly
synthetic. There are ominous background
vocals and recurrent piano noodlings. As
with the prior project, the combined effect of all of this is both a crowded,
interesting soundstage and a rather vividly urban scope. There are even voices in the background to
reinforce the idea of an album set downtown.
The recurring wonder (and it might be time to start nudging
the “genius” word into the discussion) of Albarn’s work is this knack of his
for whipping up pristine, lovely and melodic songs out of parts both discordant
and, at times, arrhythmic. The closest
earthly parallel is probably Paul Simon, but Albarn has been dramatically more productive
than Simon, taking similar risks while maintaining a similarly successful
populism.
And as for “arrhythmia.”
It happens to be the first word from third track, and statement piece, “Lonely
Press Play.” Here we are at the
technophile’s isolated downtown studio apartment, and all of the isolation
connoted herein. The initial drums are
like something off of last year’s Atoms for Peace debut, scattershot and
unnerving. That is, however, only an
exterior…a garish wrapping paper. The
heart of the track is a solemn and pretty piano melody.
The structure of the song is hopeful, a fruitful seeking out
of peace and beauty among noise and bustle.
The first line nails it:
“Arrhythmia: accepting that you
live with uncertainty.” The song offers
the joy and beauty of serenity, but it is not all smiles and realized dreams. Isolation is a serenity complication, and remains
a worthy foe:
Because
you’re not resolved in your heart,
You’re
waiting for me to improve.
Right here,
when I’m lonely I’ll press play.
Pressing play, we realize, is the saccharine option. Headphones are joy but they are not
love. What R.E.M. once called “the
beauty of the light of music,” can be hopeful, but as a goal it is inevitably just
a consolation prize. And consolation
requires disappointment and loss.
This conundrum, or cage, is at least partly self-made. A few tracks later in “The Selfish Giant,”
the narrator laments a dream of his partner leaving. Albarn has nailed it again: “It’s hard to be a lover when the TV’s
on.”
As a unified piece of art, Everyday Robots congeals as well as any Albarn production: very well.
There aren’t many punches pulled, or stunning turns of style, but he is
English, after all. Ah, yes.
Post-Morrissey England has been a domain neatly dominated
and divided by the aesthetics and accomplishments of Albarn and Thom
Yorke. There has been no third. While in broad strokes both have agreed upon
the concept of English, and human, decline and peril, what remains fascinating
is how the two of them seem to have regarded the rise of technology within and
around that decline.
Both Albarn and Yorke have taken to digital recording
techniques with abandon. For Yorke,
however, Big Tech has become an arch-foil, and on the worst days something
close to an Antichrist: an ominous,
omnipresent and vengeful menace to humanity (and to salvation) of which we must
remain paranoid, and which will always remain out to get us. It paralyzes with fear; it destroys structure
and melody.
To Albarn, technology has often seemed more like a laser
pointer for a cat. This is a man who
created a cartoon avatar for his entire band, and then had the avatar band go on tour. Even his more staid post-Gorillaz work
faintly bubbles and giggles with mischievious keystrokes. The songs do reliably lament a similar threat
to humanity, but with that embedded smirk.
And substantially more tenderness and love.
Yorke has been wearing virtual tails for years now, baton
in-hand and conducting his post-rock Radiohead version of a national symphony: with all of its attendant profile and
weight. On numerous occasions, the
burden of all of it has seemed to have just about driven him round the Bend(s.)
While Yorke has been conducting, however, Albarn has been
busking. Like a man post-bend and
penniless. He has in fact become
England’s Busker-in-Chief…standing on the national street corner, strumming
through an endless stream of clever new melodies, plugged into an amp (or laptop)
at his feet, and rendering a cracked chronicle of our End Times in his
funny-perfect voice.
It has been a service and a kindness. In his hands and in his words, none of it
sounds scary any more.
Keepers 1-6, 8-12
June 2014
