Like any split, Blur's 2002 breakup left its share of hurt feelings and disappointment, but at least chief songwriters Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon knew precisely which half they each wanted to take.
Coxon's solo albums have mostly championed bright guitar rock that's as straightforward as it gets. Albarn has taken a much different track, most notably at the helm of wildly successful experimental hip-hop cartoons Gorillaz. However, while his simian alter-ego has won critical and popular acclaim, it hasn't fulfilled Albarn's proclivity for world-weary, melancholy songwriting, the kind that dominated Blur's final album, Think Tank.
Enter The Good, the Bad & the Queen, the debut album from Albarn's latest project of the same name. A collaboration between the Blur vocalist, Verve guitarist Simon Tong, Clash bassist Paul Simonon and famed Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, the group has drawn plenty of early buzz due to the high profiles of its supporting members. Far from the stylistic mash-up that such a grouping would suggest however, The Good, the Bad & the Queen sounds, by and large, like an Albarn solo album. Aside from Tong's softly arpeggiated chord progressions and an occasional reggae bass riff from Simonon, Albarn's dreamy vocals and melancholy keyboards could pass for an exceptionally well-produced bedroom recording session.
Beginning the disc, the sparsely arranged ""History Song"" starts off as a simple guitar and vocals number and disappointingly never builds up to much more, with Albarn's grim refrain ""If you don't know it now/then you will too"" riffing on the old adage about being doomed to repeat history. The track lays down the theme for the rest of the album, a vaguely political survey of a dismal, gray and war-torn world, a theme picked up best by the disc's first two singles, ""Kingdom of Doom"" and ""Herculean."" The former sounds enough like Blur to draw comparisons to much better songs, but the track has enough energy to cement itself as an early album highlight. The latter could benefit from some of that energy, but the varied production, courtesy of Danger Mouse, keeps things interesting.
The momentum fails to build throughout most of the rest of the album. When Allen and Simonon, the group's criminally underused rhythm section, finally get a workout on ""Three Changes,"" their jazz acrobatics feel out of place under the song's drab finish. The title track closes out the disc on a dynamic high point, with a climactic, overdriven pastiche of the album's melancholy piano figures, but the stark contrast with the rest of the album makes the earlier songs seem that much more washed out.
Ultimately, Albarn's gloomy perspective just wears too thin when left unchecked for an entire album. He may want to save his bleak observations for the next Gorillaz album, or the oft-rumored Blur reunion.
