DAMON ALBARN
DR. DEE (EMI Australia)
Ever since Britpop phenomenon Blur took a time-out back in 2003, frontman Damon Albarn has kept busy with an almost bewildering array of projects. First there was the animated musical sensation that was Gorillaz. There were also various dabblings in the world music arena, including noteworthy collaborations with Congolese band Staff Benda Bilili and various African musicians, many of whom he worked with to raise money for the charity Oxfam.
What, then, is one to make of Albarn’s latest project, the sprawling pastoral folk epic that is Dr. Dee? It was originally commissioned back in 2010 by theatre director Rufus Norris and had its stage debut in Manchester late last year. It will be resurrected as part of London’s Cultural Olympiad this northern summer and it is, at least on disc, as compelling as it is occasionally also odd, confounding and bizarrely beguiling.
The 18-track song cycle is based on the life of one John Dee, an Elizabethan-era visionary who was both a renowned mathematician and the personal astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I. Though he enjoyed a lengthy reign as her personal scientific advisor, he also eventually fell into disrepute and was both arrested and maligned for his occultist beliefs.
Understandably, Albarn was fascinated by Dee’s story and this sprawling, impressionistic album is testimony both to the inherent intrigue of Dee’s life and Albarn’s talents as a composer and lyricist. Albarn’s compositions tend to focus on the more melancholic aspects of Dee’s life and, fittingly, the music is lush but largely hushed and restrained. ‘The Moon Exhalted,’ for example, employs a harpsichord and sees Albarn singing about Dee’s fascination with the rising of the sun and the waxing and waning of the moon.
Dr Dee begins with a smattering of soft birdsong, the clanging of a church bell and then segues into the first of many songs that seem to draw on everything from traditional pastoral folk to psych-folk, anti-folk and even African-inspired percussion. Speaking about this album recently, Albarn said that the project was the result of his feeling “nostalgic for a strange, lost England.” And Dee’s story, largely unexplored and untold until now, must have held huge appeal for Albarn.
Hugely experimental and undeniably epic, this is an album that is difficult to describe. It has moments of quietude and others of restrained rollicking and complicated, wonderfully immersive melodies. The best thing to do is probably to make a pot of tea, hunker down on the lounge and simply surrender to this bewitchingly melancholic and wildly ambitious project.
[rating:4/5]
Heidi Maier.
