The new Gorillaz album “The Mountain”; I gave it one listen, and that was probably enough for me. It’s undeniably well crafted and polished, but it comes across as overly mellow, almost too smooth to leave any real impression on me. There’s also a vague strain of pseudo-Buddhist, or broadly “Oriental,”a tmosphere running through it, which, to my ears, tips the whole thing into something a bit too self-consciously pretentious.

One track I might return to, though, is The Happy Dictator.

Like all the tracks on the record, it’s a collaboration, and within the first few seconds it’s obvious that the guests are Sparks. Their signature is hard to mistake for someone else: the theatrical delivery, the arch melodic turns, and  the slightly manic precision. It locks in almost immediately. And, to be honest, that’s not always a good thing. There are moments when I almost wish it were less recognizable; their style sometimes becomes so dominant that it flattens everything else. 

But The Happy Dictator feels different (to me). The opening faux-choir is unmistakably Sparks, but then Gorillaz’ lighter, almost tiptoeing groove slips in, and the whole sonic landscape pulls back, becomes more controlled; as if the brasses in an orchestra have been gently muted. I like the way the beat cuts through the dense bass line, giving it shape without overwhelming it, and how the track manages to hold together two very different modes of delivery: 2-D’s laid-back phrasing and Russell Mael’s more theatrical edge.

This sense of restraint produces, for me, a kind of vocal and musical hallucination. At certain moments, I start to hear the ghost of David Bowie hovering somewhere just behind the track. The equation itself sounds a bit absurd, Gorillaz plus Sparks somehow yielding a Bowie-esque presence, but in lines like:

No more bad news
So you can sleep well at night
And the palace of your mind
Will be bright

the impression feels uncannily real to me.

I think what’s happening has to do with the particular balance the track strikes. The arrangement leaves just enough space for the voice to become slightly unmoored, while the contrast between 2-D’s soft detachment and Mael’s stylized articulation creates a shifting vocal surface that is half intimate, half performative. That tension is very close to what Bowie often cultivated: a voice that feels both present and estranged at once.

Bowie is no longer here, but his voice – or, more precisely, the modality space  that he explored with his voice – keeps resurfacing in places where it shouldn’t quite be. Not as influence in the usual sense, not as homage, but as something closer to a residue. And that might be why I come back to it: not for Gorillaz, not even for Sparks, but for that strange moment when someone who is gone still seems to be there singing. I’d like to see the study of Bowie-esque hauntology happening at a university somewhere.