Resolved In Your Heart

Damon Albarn “Lonely Press Play”

I suppose that if you came to Damon Albarn’s music in the very late ’90s through the ’00s, you probably think of him mainly as a guy who is mostly bleak and moody, and makes music with a sort of grayish tonal palette. But I became a fan of Albarn’s music in the mid ’90s, so I mostly think of him as an artist who thrives on on-tempo tracks and an extremely bright tonality, and have spent a lot of time just wishing he’d snap out of this glum funk he’s been in for better part of the past 15 years. Albarn’s first solo record is the most bleak album of his career, and essentially sounds like a very accurate musical expression of clinical depression. Some of it is quite good, but a lot of it just feels listless and dull – too much of the same sort of half-hearted melodies over the same sort of grimy, minimalist arrangements. I’m not really sure what’s going on in Albarn’s life, but the emotion of this record feels very authentic to me, even if I don’t personally connect with a lot of it.

“Lonely Press Play” is one of the tracks that works, and makes the most sense as a “solo” track: It’s not tremendously different from what Albarn has done in his many other projects over the past few years, but it seems dialed back a bit, and a little less guarded. He’s often projected his anxieties on other characters or obscured them with oblique language in the past, but here he seems like a person who has simply stopped caring about putting up any kind of front.

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