Music

In case you missed their Electric Proms show, the acres of press, the repeats on BBC2 and the edited highlights on Radios 1-4, this is the debut concept album of the unnamed supergroup consisting of Damon Albarn (keyboards, vocals), former Clash man Paul Simonon (bass, coolness), Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen and Verve/Pulp/ super-session guitarist Simon Tong, as produced by Danger Mouse. It is, you’ll be glad to hear, great. But let’s face it, with a line-up like that, it was never going to be shit.

This is Albarn and Simonon’s love letter to London (with a particular focus on the Westway catchment area). It is, like most love letters, romantic and sentimental, and skips over the petty annoyances to find happiness in shared minutiae, such as the title track’s spot-on observation of summer’s effects on the city, and how ‘we all get our energy back and start talking again’.

‘GBQ’ is  a curiously timeless album. Even the modern flourishes, the synth sounds and studio-as-instrument tricks, are downplayed to give the album a warmly organic feel. The ensemble’s lack of a proper noun makes a lot more sense in this context – which considering the clout of the players is refreshingly anonymous.  Yes, it’s easy to recognise Simonon’s elastic dub-rock on ‘Nature Springs’, or Tony Allen’s four-drummer technique on ‘’80s Life’, but the elements are fused without bombast. The only real weakness is Albarn’s vocals – not that his plaintive yowling is necessarily offensive, it’s just the only element of consistency to an otherwise constantly metamorphosing sound.