WOEBOT

Even though I suppose I could have claimed some edge on the hipsterati, what with liking Gorillaz "Demon Dayz", I completely failed to get The Good The Bad and The Queen. I was turned off by the Dadrock PR around the group. The legends of rock super-group thing is, on paper at least, a yawn. I listened to the record at a post at the Rough Trade shop and didn't hear what Barney Hoskyns and Simon Reynolds were raving about. Persistent I downloaded it off Soulseek but failed to get past the second track. However driving up to Glasgow in my van tout-seul, the songs on a loop, a full ten hours on the road and it really sunk in.

I first listened to it before Birmingham right after The Cosmic Joker's "Galactic Supermarket" and that record's clangorous, echoaic, seemingly illogic cacophony worked perfectly as an intro to TGTBATQ. Albarn and his crew have made a very Krautrock-ish sort of record. The LP's quite remarkable highlight "Herculaneum" for instance sounds like a cut off Harmonia's "Deluxe", the choir even sounding like a tape-loop on one of Klaus Schulze's Mellotrons. There's so much begging to be said about this track. As its towering production engulfs Albarn, his voice reduced to a sonar pulse flickering from its depths, one is presented at once with a metaphor for London as Atlantis (the LP is littered with with references to the Thames, tidal waves, submarines etc) and a picture of Damon, Dennis Wilson-style, trying to drown his ego. I suppose that's quite a self-important parrallel to make, between the fate of the world and one-self, but he doesn't seem to present it in a way that's arrogant, merely as the matter-of-fact reflection of the global in the personal.

There's been this same tension in the Gorillaz work, with Damon sinking himself further and further into the mix, taking an unassuming third place to Jamie Hewlett's drawings and Dangermouse's beats, but regardless his personality rises spectrally above that project. In contrast, Nick Cave's ensemble, the gruesomely unattractive Grinderman thing (eugh, lose the moustache Nick), seems like a calculated move. What I keep wondering is how Albarn ended up so seeming so unhappy, even, perhaps by meriting of whining like a curr, sounding like Thom Yorke on "The Bunting". I've seen him up close in recent years too and that bore out my impression that he's, well, slightly sad. Maybe there are personal reasons, but equally perhaps he just feels publicly stigmatised. After all, in spite of the Gorillaz success, he's been widely loathed and ridiculed; that's bound to affect a person. I do think it is ironic that with TGTBATQ he's created just the sort of LP that Noel Gallagher would give his right arm to have made.

Tony Allens' is a very interesting presence on the record. You'd think his Afro-Beat chops would have been used to propel the band, that they'd sit squarely at the back of the band, but not at all. His contributions are almost always textural, and are positioned right at the centre of the gigantic ensemble sound, perhaps even more central than Damon. On a track like "Kingdom of Doom" he's all but inaudible. I don't think this is just a case of the band failing to get behind him, it's a very interesting production choice.

I just loved this record. Yes it was nice to flash on things I've enjoyed in the past in a renewed, but more complex way, records like (crucially) Madness's "Rise and Fall", which we caned as kids, and Big Audio Dynamite's first LP but also hip stuff like Vivienne Goldman's "Lauderette" (the key "messed-up" London text) and Patrick Fitzgerald. But mainly it's just such a delicious sonic feast, I can't wait till I get my greasy mitts on the vinyl. I saw this funny thing on The Antiques Roadshow the other night, some Glaswegian dude playing his collection of Singing Bowls in the Kelvingrove art gallery. When he starts to scrape, you just hear this rusty scraping sound, but in a minute or so this great pulsating cloud of harmonics starts to hover, almost menacingly in the air. TGTBATQ is like that, by the end your head is ringing.