Dr Dee
As the frontman for Blur and Gorillaz, Damon Albarn is plenty busy. Yet he\'s also put out the album *Rocket Juice & the Moon* with Afro-funk legend Tony Allen and this soundtrack to a Rufus Norris opera that debuted in England in 2011. *Dr Dee* is about John Dee, a 16th-century mathematician/sorcerer who served under Queen Elizabeth I. Albarn\'s creativity has been eclectic and adventurous, and nowhere more so than on this unusual collection, where opera singers, acoustic instrumentation, woodwinds, strings, and even a devilish sense of cartoon music creeps in. \"Temptation Comes in the Afternoon\" is a jocular piece that\'s part Hanna-Barbera. \"Watching the Fire That Waltzed Away\" furthers the sense of a world spinning out of control with its pulsing operatic menace. It\'s a difficult listen, with a few moments of conventional beauty (\"Cathedrals,\" \"Apple Carts\") amid plenty of surprises and high-art dreams.
A departure from his recent work with Gorillaz and Rocket Juice & the Moon, Dr Dee is the stately, melancholy soundtrack to the opera Damon Albarn wrote for director Rufus Norris.
Holding a tinfoil lightning bolt and wearing a cotton beard, a teenaged Damon Albarn starred in a school production of the operetta Orpheus In The Underworld in the early ’80s. “Damon was Zeus,” remembers Albarn’s music teacher, speaking to The Observer in 2009, “which just about says it all.” Since that mythic…
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Damon Albarn's Dr Dee began life as an opera, debuting at the Manchester International Festival last year. As an album, the lack of visual material does hinder enjoyment and understanding: the work was conceived to tell the life story of Elizabethan occultist John Dee, but Albarn's abstract, impressionist lyrics fail to tell anything resembling a coherent story about the man or his interests.
There's something noble about Dr. Dee, a mostly folk record about 16th-century British mathematician and occultist John Dee.
<p>Damon Albarn's hymn to 16th-century polymath John Dee is arcane yet fascinating, writes <strong>Kitty Empire</strong></p>
<p>Damon Albarn's latest concept album concerns Elizabethan mathematician/philosopher John Dee; the story's pretty opaque, but the music's great, writes <strong>Robin Denselow</strong></p>
Britpop legend's Elizabethan opera proves a difficult listen out of context. CD review by Lisa-Marie Ferla