Songs for an endless summer #3

Hello dear reader!

Today in the US is Memorial Day. When many folks gather to cook, laugh, and have a good time, not for any patriotic reasons, most people just have the day off. It’s also the day that acts as an unofficial start of the summer, since many of the debauchery and outdoor activity foreshadows the months to come. As I write, the sounds from my neighborhood echo on my walls like cascading waves of the endless ocean. That is if the ocean were speakers playing dancehall, and the waves were the smell of barbeque. Lets take this perspective to Melancholy Hill.

It’s funny to be nostalgic for the Gorillaz even though Damon Albarn and company have released more albums than what was available when Plastic Beach first dropped. The Gorillaz are now at eight LP releases, but in my delusions they are still at three. Plastic Beach (their third album) remains their last best work, everything since has not come close to the actual magic on this record. It is only a testament of the project’s timelessness that “On Melancholy Hill” is the next subject of Songs for an endless summer. From it’s sonic bounce and literary lushness, I can not overstate how good of a song this is. Within the context of the larger ambitions of Plastic Beach, you can draw out the narrative in play, but to save time and the detailed backtracking, we’ll look at the track on its own.

Soft drums paired with the hazy-as-fuck synth pads create this omnisciently familiar beach aesthetic. It’s easy to bop to. Yet, there is fuzzy, tonally harmonious white noise that persists throughout the track. If you listen past Albarn’s vocals you catch, and can’t ever unhear it. Currently, I believe I am seeing red lights as I concentrate on the hum of the synth. Not to mention the organ melody that grounds the whole things in the blanket of bright cheer despite the bleak lyrics! My friends we are listening to fire in the booth rn!!

Albarn sings about a distant lover and looking out for other days when this lover can be close to him again. In the song, there are plastic trees, submarines, and a manatee that are all positioned to sit “Just looking out for the day when you’re close to me.” It’s a sad song where the narrator is not getting what they want and neither is their lover. No one wins in story, except the reader, maybe. Part of the narrator’s hope for being close again is part “of another dream,” so there may be no hope as any happiness will forever be a dream.

Part of melancholy (as I felt in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011)) is that sadness is partially the point: it’s an aimless sadness that doesn’t want to be solved. It’s a feeling that you wallow in and hold on to, a symbiotic relationship that works so much as you want to feel bad for yourself. “On Melancholy Hill” swims in a sea of inexplicable sadness because the narrator can’t be close to their lover, so they plant themselves on a hill and wait for a day that will never come. Coinciding with my theme of the summer being a feeling you can’t grasp but only long for. I don’t believe people are actually happier because of the summer—rather what they idealize and desire of summer makes them happy—and that is always an arms length away. The happiness is in chasing those desires. A similar disposition as melancholy: it’s a pleasure to elongate the sadness even though it makes no sense to do so. Kind of like Anri’s “Last Summer Whisper”: she knows the relationship is over but she wants to endure the heartache just one more time so relish in the sadness a little more.

“On Melancholy Hill” can certainly all be explained by putting within the narrative of Plastic Beach (and the greater Gorillaz fictional timeline), but I will choose this isolated feeling of nostalgia. It hurts good.

Thanks for reading. Cheers!