The Beat Surrender

As any regular reader of this site will know, it’s fair top say that i’m a huge Blur fan, always have been and no doubt always will be. With Blur no longer recording together (at least it seems that way), then it’s been left to various Damon Albarn projects to keep the Blur flag flying.

Sure Graham Coxon is on to about album number five as a solo artist, but at the end of the day his stuff is in the main second rate to Albarns, likewise his live gigs. While Damon has pushed the boundaries with his music and live shows, Coxon has found himself only really enjoying any degree of success when he reverted to the type of music that he apparantly hated Blur doing, namely guitar pop and punk pop tracks.

Damon has of course given us a couple of very good Gorillaz albums, the equally good yet lower profile Mali Music Project, the supergroup The Good, The Bad and The Queen and now a Chinese oera. Yes that’s right..a Chinese opera, now I have more faith in him than most but even I had to do a double take when I heard about his latest project.

It actually started a couple of years ago when he hatched a plan along with fellow Gorillaz man Jamie Hewlett to produce an Opera version of the Monkey story, a story that is etched in Chinese history and has of course been made into a cult TV programme.

The opera made it’s debut in Manchester last year and was a huge success, both critically and commercially, mainly due to the attention to detail and vision of Damon Albarn. It’s those two characteristics of his that have made this album such a joy, every track is littered with authentic instrumentation, Mandarin lyrics also feature heavily and in many other peoples hands the music would have been clumsy and lacking authenticity, listening to Journey To The West though is a surprising pleasure as i’m not an opera fan generally, but more importantly gives you a real feel for the story.

Within a couple of listens you’ll find yourself drawn into the neat flourishes, swept along by the melodies on offer and generally lost into the journey. It’s hard picking favourites from the 22 tracks on offer here but Heavenly Peach Banquet is a twinkling electronica track that is a real delight, The Living Sea features some beautiful vocals and strings, Monkey Bee has a great riff that races along in the second half of the song, but the main one for me is Battle In Heaven which has so many parts to it that it’s almost like a mini opera in itself.

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