THE concept album marks a return to Britpop form for Damon Albarn, lead singer of British band Blur and the musical brains behind the Grammy-nominated cartoon dub-rock band Gorillaz.
The singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has joined forces with bassist Paul Simonon of the Clash, ex-Verve guitarist Simon Tong and Tony Allen, the venerable Nigerian drummer from Fela Kuti's Africa 70 band, to form an unnamed supergroup that's already receiving critical hosannas in Britain. Produced by Gnarls Barkley's beat-making maestro Danger Mouse (who collaborated with Albarn on Gorillaz's second CD, "Demon Days"), its sound encompasses punk, Kinks-esque rock, world beat, doo wop and even ethereal passages reminiscent of Ennio Morricone film scores.
More to the point, the group's January album, "The Good, the Bad and the Queen," is a meditation on the London of today, cataloging millennial Britain's roiling cultural life with a wry straightforwardness akin to Albarn's last Britop effort: Blur's 1994 album "Parklife."
The album's stated concept is not so much "London Calling" as a kind of product recall for the British Empire -- London Recalled? -- as evidenced by the lyrics of "Three Changes," in which he calls England a "stroppy little island of mixed-up people."
"My country is involved in the imperial merry-go-round. Once it was driving, now it's in the back seat," Albarn says. "The album is saying how we engage in these horrific atrocities without a lot of understanding of what we're engaging in. You feel very helpless and sad."
Just don't call "TGTBATQ" a companion piece to "Parklife" within his earshot. "You can't set out to say, 'I'm going to write a bookend to Britpop," says Albarn, with not just a little agitation. "It's about setting the record straight. 'Parklife' wasn't a happy, cheerful record looking at the past. It was an angry, cynical record about the ways Britain was changing at the time."
Hence the Good, the Bad and the Queen -- also the group's de facto name.
The Blur frontman's path to Britpop redemption was pitted with false starts, however. He recorded an album's worth of material in Lagos, Nigeria, with Allen and Tong in 2001 but then decided to scrap it in 2003 after concluding that it sounded like "a very convincing Nigerian record that wasn't quite right."
