Rocket Juice & the Moon is one of three albums steered by former Blur frontman Damon Albarn scheduled for release before this summer. For a presumably rich man, he keeps busy. He also understands the value of what I like to call the "container." The container is a set of limitations, an acknowledgement that on any given project there's no feasible way to have it all, and attempting to have it all is one of the first steps to failure. This is why the idea of "fusion" food may seem exhausting to you, or why art that professes to "defy genre" tends to end up "sucking."
Blur's most celebrated album, Parklife, was basically a series of vignettes written in different styles, and Albarn's career since has taken the same tack on an album-to-album and band-to-band scale: The sneaker-store electro of Gorillaz, the African blues of Mali Music, the moody dub-folk of The Good, the Bad & the Queen. He's worked on four film soundtracks and a couple of operas. His approach to his art has been more like a film director's than a musician's, marked by collaboration, variety, and the attitude that it's the overall trajectory of his career-- rather than any one album-- that will define him.
The core of Rocket Juice-- an album of West African-style funk and psychedelia-- is Albarn, former Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea. As someone who has always appreciated RHCP's clean sound as temporary relief from the muddy, red-state testicle rock generally favored by my gym's sound system, Flea's involvement here is a plus. Like Allen, he is a precise, powerful player but also a nimble one, and it's their back-and-forth that defines the album's feel: Light, skipping, controlled, but slightly off-balance, the sound of a wind-up toy tottering along the sidewalk.
Twelve of RJ's 18 tracks are under three minutes long, and most function as groove capsules, sketches, ditties, many of them anchored by funny sound effects and synthesizer noises, many without a central lyric or melody. While bands are free to break the mold whenever they like, my sense is that there's an internal friction between this group's loose, jammy approach and the lengths of the tracks, which don't really have time to work up to anything. Parts of the album feel like a continuous segue with no point of arrival. There are exceptions. Erykah Badu guests on "Hey Shooter", and Albarn enlists a handful of African rappers and singers, including a few from the Africa Express exchange program: Ghana's M.anifest and M3nsa, and Mali's Fatoumata Diawara. But RJ is, as far as I can tell, designed to sound loose and off-the-cuff, sort of like a party-- and like a party, it's more concerned with collective atmosphere than any single performance. The result is that the lesser-known performers here end up sounding more like placeholders than specific people: male rapper, female crooner.
It's when Albarn sings that the album seems to break its own mold. Despite the variety of styles he's worked in over the years, there is an easy 80-minute CD-R waiting to be made of pretty, dog-eared, rainy-day songs like "Poison", starting with Parklife's "Badhead", moving through The Great Escape's "Yuko and Hiro", and stopping at just about every one of his projects up through Gorillaz's 2010 single "On Melancholy Hill". What to make of songs like "Poison" in this context, though, I'm not sure: It's one of the album's more singular, coherent moments, but it's also when RJ's container starts to feel leaky.
RJ takes its cues from Fela Kuti, Funkadelic, Sun Ra, and scads of African artists-- most of them from Nigeria, Ghana, and other countries on the western coast-- compiled or reissued over the past 15 years. Good. Okay then-- the album knows what it's doing. But as someone who confesses to having a hard time getting through hour after hour of open-ended funk jams, someone who has always been suspicious of the idea that I need to listen more patiently to every second of every Sun Ra or Funkadelic or Fela album in order to really feel the full cosmic power of the grooves, Rocket Juice & the Moon feels like a decent record, but an unfocused, meandering one-- an album, ironically, contained by its lack of containers.
