For Damon Albarn, modern life is still pretty much rubbish

LOS ANGELES — As the lead singer (and the pretty face) of Blur, Damon Albarn became a star writing songs about England — witty, tuneful, stylistically omnivorous character studies like "Parklife" and "Country House" that along with Oasis' blunter-edged anthems helped define the rowdy Britpop scene of the 1990s.

But Albarn's latest solo album addresses a different place: Iceland, where he became a citizen last year, decades after his first visit in 1997. Full of slow-mo ballads that set Albarn's tender croon amid shimmering instrumental textures, "The Nearer the Mountain, More Pure the Stream Flows" began when he convened a group of orchestral musicians at his home in Iceland in 2019 to "tune into the landscape" outside his living-room window, as he put it.

"Somebody with a trombone would concentrate on a cloud going over the mountain," he said. "Someone else would play the waves." The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced an early end to the sessions. But