Dark, dark, dark—The Good, the Bad & the Queen is another Damon Albarn/Danger Mouse soundtrack to postmillennial anxiety, such an effective downer of an album that it’s uplifting. With Gorillaz’ Demon Days, the singer/producer duo scored a similar cyberpunk fantasy: a sinister record rendered literally cartoonish thanks to slick graphics and a slew of outlandish cameos. The supergroup genetics of TGTB&TQ suggests similar contrivance—as does Albarn’s headfakery about the band not being a band and not having a name—but ultimately, the music speaks louder than the sound bites around it.
Even though the music’s pretty quiet. These 12 songs unfold in sparse, onionskin layers that are more about mood than melody, laying out a shadowy aural landscape that demands actual listening to parse. Danger Mouse’s production encompasses the complete spectrum of highs and lows and all the space in between—Albarn’s lost-boy vocals and Paul Simonon’s bass bookend DM’s twittering, digitized fizz. Frequently plying acoustic guitar, Simon Tong sounds comfortably confined, opening the album with a silvery, reverbed strum and later staying subdued on electric.
But where’s Tony Allen? Albarn is a pop auteur, Simonon’s Clash connection ropes in the aging rockist set, and Danger Mouse currently can do no wrong, but the inclusion of the Afrobeat originator is what makes TGTB&TQ so fascinating on paper. It’s a full six songs into the album before the cracking of a discernable drumbeat—and then it’s cloaked in effects. Nowhere does Allen let loose. Even as he inventively hopscotches across the eerie work song of “Nature Springs” and the dissonant, organ-grinding “Three Changes,” he’s underused. Whether it’s a ballsy move or a misstep, his absence might be why the album’s first single, “Herculean,” failed to make much impact when it was released a couple months back. That’s also the sound of TGTB&TQ: underwhelming at first with unmet promise, with more to it than expectations allow.
It all adds up to a sort of urban campfire dub serenade, survivors staying warm and human around a flaming tire stuck in a street-corner garbage can. Bleak, yes, but that’s the dystopian England Albarn dwells in, “a stroppy little island of mixed-up people,” he sings. If this is modern life in London, Americans are a lot closer in depleted spirit to our limey cousins than anyone would expect. Wartime references are rife, and in the case of the doo-wop-inflected “80’s Life,” especially sharp: “I don’t want to live a war that’s got no end in our time.” Such lyrics—and such song titles, along with “History Song,” “Kingdom of Doom,” and “A Soldier’s Tale”—are Albarn’s attempt at context within English history and legacy. Backing ooh-oohs and aah-aahs reach into the past, piano sets in-the-moment drama, weird studio effects are out of time altogether.
When the album arrives at its finale—the seven-minute title track—the listener’s been nearly numbed, the only reasonable response to all the preceding twilight weariness. Not surprisingly, the last song is the clincher. The piano-led, minor-key melody rises slowly astride Simonon’s bass and Allen’s shuffling stickwork, gaining momentum with Tong’s driving guitar, eventually skyrocketing into a frenzy. Albarn offers, finally, a pinprick of sunshine, singing about “the blessed routine of the good, the bad, and the queen,” assuring that “the kids are never gonna tire because everything has so slightly come.”
It’s not Gorillaz-loving kids this album is aimed at; it’s an audience with greater perspective, historical and musical. Albarn went out of his way in recruiting Allen and Simonon (who supposedly hasn’t picked up a bass in 15 years), two icons who carry little cachet for anyone under 25. Add to those facts the album’s somber tone and sobering lyrics, and there’s a justified sense of importance, one that will be lost on the TRL set. And yet it’s they who Albarn is concerned with, the ones primed to inherit an ailing, postempire London. “Don’t kick the crackheads off the green, they’re a political party,” he pleads. The young, the dispossessed, the ones not listening—with a bit of guidance, they can salvage the good from the bad. 