Don't you just hate it when somebody calls their latest release a 'project'? As if it were nothing more than another management-tasked, business-speak product designed to extract money from citizens?

So say hello to The Good The Bad & The Queen, Damon's fourth release in four years, and his fourth different artist title in a row. You had Blur in 2003, Damon Albarn in 2004, Gorillaz in 2005, and now The Good, The Bad & The Queen in 2007. Can't he just be.. himself? Why hide behind all the aliases? The different titles and the alternate nomdeplumes? Does Damon not know who the fuck he is anymore?

And is it any good?

Well, it thinks it's better than it is. As an album, "The Good, The Bad And The Queen" continues the trend Albarn has followed since the turn of the decade, musically and lyrically simplistic, efficient, clipped, minimal. Whatever phrase you want to use, but it lacks, as all the recent work has, the shot-in-the-heart honesty of "13". In many respects, it's as if Albarn took a step back from creating anything personal, hiding behind an artifice of abstract concepts.

It's still a vast improvement upon the constructed artifice of "Demon Days", but it's still the work of a man in an artistic vacuum. In some ways, "The Good The Bad & The Queen" is a great commuting record - designed to somehow soothe exhausted office workers on a crowded train journey home after yet another long day chained to a desk. The half-committed, lazy melodies, the fragmentary vocals, and the broken rhythms that barely catch pace or travel faster than a heartbeat are empty lullabies. Lyrically the album is, as indicated, shallow and simplistic, but also evocative of London. Estuaries fade into the language of a suburban, old city.

In "Herculean", Albarn may have written his best song of the decade, but it's hard to tell : the delivery is non-commital, the music oddly passionless. By the albums end, the overall feeling is one of a detached, unexcited, even bored journey home. Outside a featureless plain passes, the commuter sits in a seat and tries to capture sleep in the dead time., and language falls apart in meaningless couplets (in the title track) such as "the kids are never going to tired, coz everything has ever so slightly come". What does it mean?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN? Nothing. For Albarn words are merely verbalised sounds, and he has jettisoned the power of language to communicate. For all the sense this album makes he could be singing in Hopelandic. At least he isn't pretending to be four 16 year old Japanese Schoolchildren called Noodles, and affording his collaborators a long overdue equal billing. Whilst a vast improvement upon the packaged and pointless artifice of the Gorillaz 'project', "The Good, The Bad and The Queen" isn't a bad album by any interpretation : just an interesting, shallow and imperfect shrug of a record.

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