The Mountain Review

Gorillaz records usually work as a guest list with a mood attached, and this one finally works as an album. The subject is mortality and Albarn approaches it sideways: the arrangements are bright, the tempos are quick, and a lot of the running order plays like a wake where everybody is dancing. Indian classical strings and percussion run through the whole thing rather than sitting in one showcase track, and the collaborators, singing in Hindi, Yoruba, Arabic, Spanish and Russian, are used as voices in a chorus instead of as marketing.

Critics almost uniformly call it the richest world the project has built since Plastic Beach, and the comparison is fair. The sequencing has real shape and the melodies are the strongest Albarn has written in years. The weakness is the writing at close range. Line by line the lyrics reach for the universal and land on the vague, and a couple of the longer stretches in the back half float when they should push.

At sixty six minutes it asks for patience it does not always repay. But the whole is bigger than the parts here for the first time in fifteen years, and that is worth a great deal.