Music reviews: Bruno Mars, Mitski, and Gorillaz

‘The Romantic’ by Bruno Mars

★★★

“A new Bruno Mars album is not a grand artistic or personal statement,”
said Tom Breihan in Stereogum. The 40-year-old multi-Grammy winner
is “a one-man tribute act,” a performer whose hits are invariably “a pastiche of sounds that tend to do well at weddings,” essentially “anything that might get the party started.” His first solo album in nearly 10 years delivers more of the same, though it adds traces of Latin pop and “goes harder on sincere puppy-dog-eyes low-dance numbers” than any Mars album since his 2010 debut. Just nine songs long, it’s “a supremely easy listen,” but nothing more. The album’s recent No. 1 hit, “I Just Might,” was “clearly designed to please large crowds,” said Andy Kellman in AllMusic. It seems to mix early Jackson 5 with disco-era Leo Sayer, just as “Cha Cha Cha” connects Havana, Tijuana, and Philadelphia and “Something Serious” pairs Philly soul with 1970s Latin rock. In the decade between his solo albums, Mars has continued to crank out hits as a collaborator. Here, as always, “no matter how trite the lyrics are, he sells them effectively,” and his “beaming rasp of a voice” remains a remarkable instrument.

‘Nothing’s About to Happen to Me’ by Mitski

★★★

The new Mitski album is “as much an immersive literary experience as an exercise in listening,” said Hanif Abdurraqib in The New Yorker. For all 11 songs, the 35-year-old indie rock star assumes the character of a recluse in a messy house. Though the music combines “big orchestral swings” and “moments of loud, frantic guitar,” its formal ambitions “feel secondary to its lyrical themes.” At a line-by-line level, “the song-writing comes alive with imagery and ache,” but the album’s “most fascinating quality” is its “wonderfully complicated” central character. The singer is “having fun here,” imagining herself as a loner whose only companions are two cats, said Craig Jenkins in NYMag.com. There’s talk of loneliness and even death, but Mitski’s recluse enjoys the freedom of isolation, and “even in its glummest moments, this album is full of life.” Its quiet songs are “intricately plush,” and many lines are more funny than forlorn. All in all, “it’s Mitski’s best work since Be the Cowboy,” the 2018 album that brought her an unwanted degree of fame. Putting her own such worries aside, “she works wonders with a little distance.”

‘The Mountain’ by Gorillaz

★★★

“Much of The Mountain fits into the enduring Gorillaz tradition of the
apocalyptic party album,” said Jazz Monroe in Pitchfork. This time, the animated band, a project Damon Albarn launched with his friend Jamie Hewlett in 1998, weaves in the voices of half a dozen collaborators who’ve died since the Britpop veteran coaxed them into the studio. But their presence fits the album’s theme. Made shortly after the deaths of both Albarn’s and Hewlett’s fathers, it’s “a convocation of souls,” and while some of its efforts to blur the line between the dead and living “teeter into folly,” Albarn “takes an infectious pride in linking one world to the next.” Because the album is also inspired by a trip Albarn and Hewlett made to India, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian, “a host of Indian artists,” including traditional musicians, contribute. Given the record’s grim theme, “the overall mood is weirdly upbeat.” You’ll hear “post-disco boogie” on “The Moon Cave” and “Arabic acid house” on “Damascus.” The idea that we live on after death provides a uniting theme, and “the result is an unexpected career highlight, a quarter of a century in.”