Monkey

BBC Olympic credits give it a gentle push too

Monkey: Journey To The West

What is it with Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett and monkeys?

Here Albarn gets to indulge his apparent love of all things primate with his love of world music with the CD release of his Cantonese opera.

Quite literally, mate: it's based on the Cantonese legend of Monkey (should you remember the old TV series) and it's sung in Cantonese.

For the CD release, the orchestral arrangements accompanying the acclaimed opera are replaced with a more typically Albarn lo-fi sound.

It works surprisingly well. Even without the opera's impressive visuals or a simultaneous translation, this is moody, evocative stuff, an interesting bridge between his last 'world' project, the excellent Mali Music and the downbeat moodiness of The Good, The Bad and The Queen.

It's not entirely successful and, inevitably the points of the story won't come across unless you're multilingual. As a result, the album is probably destined to be the soundtrack to many a North London dinner party than an all-pervasive, Gorillaz-level smash.

Still, it's frequently beautiful and it's undoubtedly the best Catonese / Essex collaboration you'll hear this year.

They say: '...the melody lines are so immediately recognisable as his: they drip with the same kind of languorous melancholy found in the songs (Albarn) wrote for the Good the Bad and the Queen's album. More importantly, it never slips into ah-so parody. You may be very aware of who wrote the music, but you never feel as if you're listening to Blur in black bean sauce.'

We say: Intriguing, bold and worth a listen - but outside of the theatre, it's hard to see it as much more than many background music.

Best track: The Living Sea

3/5

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