At the height of
Blur
's popularity,
Damon Albarn
casually let it be known that he harbored a desire to create musical theater -- a revelation that wasn't exactly a surprise to anybody intimately familiar with the theatricality of
's Brit-pop trilogy, particularly portions of
The Great Escape
which felt as if they were designed for the stage.
Albarn
abandoned an explicit music hall bent in the aftermath of
vs.
Oasis
, first digging deeply into American indie rock and then getting ever artier, eventually abandoning the very idea of bands themselves in favor of conceptual projects like
The Good, the Bad & the Queen
. His score for
Chen Shi-Zheng
's stage production
Journey to the West
-- based on the ancient Chinese novel
-- fits right in with these conceptual works, reuniting him with
Gorillaz
cohort
Jamie Hewlett
, who designed the visuals for the opera, while recalling elements of his 2002
Mali Music
exploration and traces of his eerie collaborative score with
Michael Nyman
for
Antonia Bird
's 1999 film
Ravenous
.
relies heavily on Chinese instrumentation and harmony on
but the score, as a whole, is considerably less explicitly worldbeat than
, as
weaves in many familiar motifs from his oeuvre, including stiff pre-programmed two-step drum loops, post-punk synths, waves of dreamy textures, circular carnivalesque chords, and the occasional blast of cathartic noise. What he most emphatically does not rely upon is anything remotely pop -- no pop song structures, hooks, or harmonies -- a decision that reads perhaps a bit more bold than it plays, as this is a symphonic suite that is meant to be experienced as a whole, not parsed out in bite-sized bits. This also does mean that
is perhaps best experienced on-stage, as it was meant to be heard in tandem with
and
Hewlett
's visuals, but heard as its own work, it's hard not to admire, if not exactly embrace,
's achievement here, as his work is not only ambitious, it is serious and understated, the work of a true composer. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine