Damon Albarn: The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows review – beautifully haunting

(Transgressive)
Probably the most pushed artists of the Britpop period, now unbothered by business success, is again with a second solo album that drifts alongside in a melancholy, stoned mist

When Might’s Glastonbury livestream finally creaked into life, it provided viewers an fascinating research in contrasts. At 9pm, Coldplay appeared, rolling out the large hits from their 20-year career on an illuminated platform in entrance of the Pyramid stage, the empty subject crammed with lights. It was a performance with a distinct hint of top-dog gamesmanship about it: ignore the operating order – everybody knows who the headliners are right here. Afterwards, the cameras reduce to a mulleted Damon Albarn seated at a piano. He performed a collection of serpentine unreleased songs, adorned with shivering, summary electronics and guitar and infrequently atonal string arrangements. He performed a track from Dr Dee, his 2011 opera concerning the 16th-century mathematician, astronomer and occultist. And when he finally dished up something from the Blur or Gorillaz catalogues that the casual observer may know, it was rearranged in a method that made it sound darker and sadder.

It was a neat illustration of Albarn’s modern strategy to music-making. By all accounts one of the zealously driven artists of the Britpop period, he has spent the last 20 years doing something you'd anticipate more main rock stars to do, but that hardly any truly appear to manage: utilizing the area and time created by vast success as a way to do exactly what they need, unbothered by business considerations. Doing precisely what he needs has typically occasioned extra huge success – Gorillaz’s second album Demon Days bought 8m copies worldwide – but there have also been musicals with lyrics in Cantonese, collaborative tasks influenced by Sun Ra, Funkadelic and Fela Kuti, and soundtracks for immersive theatre works performed by the Kronos Quartet, none of which look like have been made with an eye fixed on the charts or prime billing at festivals.