The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows

Damon Albarn conceived The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows -- his second solo album, arriving seven years after Everyday Robots -- as an orchestral ode to his adopted homeland of Iceland. Albarns plans were scuppered by the COVID-19 pandemic, so he altered his approach, adapting and altering the material he wrote in Iceland in January 2020 with the aid of two longtime collaborators: Simon Tong, the guitarist in the Good, the Bad & the Queen, and Mike Smith, an auxiliary player in both Blur and Gorillaz. The Nearer the Fountain retains some of the airy atmosphere of an orchestral piece, yet its untethered to the ground. As it floats in the slipstream, the album shifts its shape, sometime luxuriating in open spaces, sometimes snapping in focus thanks to a pronounced beat or shimmering wash of analog keyboards. The open sonic vistas owe a debt to Albarns abiding love of Iceland, a devotion which manifests itself through aural ambience and lyrics where isolation intertwines environmental decay. As he often delivers his lines with little more than a slight murmur -- the title phrase, taken from a John Clare poem, recurs throughout the album -- the emphasis is on the music, not the words. Unhurried and stark without being austere, The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows seems suspended from time but not place: as misty and evocative as it is, the music is grounded in a specific location, which gives this elegiac, enveloping album an emotional weight. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

トランスグレッシヴ発となった7年ぶりのソロ2作目は、その間のプロジェクト作品とは一変して、簡素な編成で繊細な感情を紡いだ内容に。もともとアイスランドの風景にインスパイアされたオーケストラ作品を意図していたそうで、荘厳なストリングスや自然音も印象的だ。往年のデーモン節を思わせる"Darkness To Light"もあって、全体の趣はどこかヴォーカル・アルバム的。多くを共作したサイモン・トングのギターも優しい。
bounce (C)香椎 恵