It's like a melancholic digital scrapbook of a road trip across America.
A restless, digital loneliness that finds beauty in the monotony of travel.
Recorded over 32 days during the North American leg of the 'Escape to Plastic Beach' tour in 2010, The Fall is famously the first high-profile album created almost entirely on an iPad. Damon Albarn utilized various apps to sketch out these 15 tracks, intending the release to be a 'diary' of his experiences. Unlike previous Gorillaz efforts, which were multi-million dollar studio affairs, this project is lo-fi and largely solo, though it features brief contributions from Bobby Womack and Mick Jones. The album functions as a sonic travelogue, utilizing field recordings of train station announcements and radio chatter to anchor its electronic compositions in the physical reality of the American road. Critically, it is viewed as a fascinating experiment that highlights Albarn's melodic gift even when stripped of his usual collaborators and high-end production tools.
Put this on for
watching blurred highway markers through a bus window at dusksolitary airport layover with only a vending machine for companytracing condensation on a motel window while the heater humsdrifting between sleep and wakefulness in a moving vehiclemidnight walk through a city that isn't your homefiddling with a radio dial in the middle of the desertquiet breakfast in a diner where nobody knows your name
Moments worth waiting for
The transition in 'Hillbilly Man' from a gentle acoustic strum into a jagged, synthetic electronic pulse.
The haunting, layered vocal harmonies of 'Amarillo' that feel like a ghost haunting a digital circuit.
The collage of radio snippets and station IDs that bleed through 'The Parish of Space Dust'.
Sounds like
2010s production with a 2010s soul
Sits beside
Sleep Well Beast - The National, The Eraser - Thom Yorke, Transatlanticism - Death Cab for Cutie, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 - Aphex Twin
Lyrical territory
travel_journey, nostalgia, self_examination
03Deviation
The Fall · vs · Gorillaz
Artist
This Album
Low Energy
Energy · ↓ −36% less than usual
On this album, low energy sits about 36% less prominent than across the rest of the artist's catalogue.
