One of my chief guilty pleasures when it comes to music is the virtual band Gorillaz. Known for their distinctive blend of electronic, hip-hop, and alternative sounds, the live-animated collab led by Blur frontman Damon Albarn caused a sensation when they burst onto the scene at the turn of the millennium.
Gorillaz is noteworthy if for no other reason than they’re one of the few major acts to largely dodge the effects of Cultural Ground Zero.
If you’re old enough to remember Y2K and 9-11, your first exposure to Gorillaz was probably this groundbreaking video:
After unleashing a colorful yet vaguely sinister tour-de-force on the music world, Gorillaz seemed to vanish as suddenly as they’d arrived. Nobody thought much of it. After all, many’s the one-hit wonder that takes the globe by storm, only to fade into obscurity.
But that wasn’t to be Gorillaz’s fate. They had something else in store.
After an absence of almost five years, Gorillaz returned stronger than ever with what many consider their masterpiece, Demon Days.
Millennials will remember hearing this ubiquitous number on rap and top 40 stations alike back in the mid-aughts:
Full disclosure: having been a bassist way back in the day, I’m a sucker for a song with a bass lead.
Not that the record can’t stand on its own merits. In fact, I consider Demon Days a perfect album. If you haven’t listened to it, correct that omission ASAP. It’s ideal mood music for the spooky season. And it’s guaranteed to fire up any Halloween party.
After the smash success of Demon Days, Gorillaz retreated into another period of dormancy. During the interim, Albarn and Gorillaz illustrator Jamie Hewlett, also of Tank Girl fame, dickered around with the direction they wanted to take the band in next. That troubled production came through on Gorillaz’s third album, Plastic Beach. Though it features a wealth of excellent songs, you have to pick through subpar, throwaway, and downright weird tracks to find the gems, making for an overall uneven experience.
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Sorry, must’ve dozed off for a minute there …
In the final analysis, Plastic Beach makes for good best-of mix fodder, but the whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts, as was the case with Demon Days.
Soon after that, Albarn released a collection of tracks he recorded on his tablet while on the road. But the next real Gorillaz album, Humanz, appeared in 2017. Albarn and his collaborators must have caught a nasty case of TDS, because the record came out as a long-winded tantrum they threw over Donald Trump’s presidential win. It sounds so dated now that current versions of the album’s songs have overtly political lyrics bleeped out. In artistic terms, Humanz has a couple of solid tracks, but overall it feels overproduced and too clever for its own good.
Fortunately, Albarn & co. seemed to realize their mistake. Because the follow up to Humanz, titled The Now Now, got the band back on track. Gorillaz has always been experimental, so it’s not so much a return to form as a change in direction along simpler, more honest lines. And it’s got what I consider one of the best and most underrated Gorillaz tracks of all time:
Editor’s note: And no, the title has nothing to do with men in dresses invading the ladies’ room. It’s Gorillaz’s trademark spelling applied to “Trance”.
Then they tried doing a web series with each episode being a collaboration with a different artist. And they released the first “season” as an album called Song Machine. But aside from the songs that feature name acts from the 80s, they couldn’t seem to find decent contemporary talent for the rest. Final score: 5.5/11.
But I’m still sharing a video from Song Machine, because Peter Hook bass lead.
So after almost two decades of not quite being able to recapture the magic of their first two albums, Gorillaz seemed relegated to doing corny YouTube content with obscure token acts propped up by aging 80s talent.
Sad!
But don’t despair, Gorillaz fans. Our animated minstrels are back to once again pushed the boundaries of musical innovation with their 2023 release Cracker Island!
And I’m gonna say it: This is the third masterpiece they aimed for and just missed with Plastic Beach.
Check this out:
That’s not a return to form. But nor is it a creative pivot.
It’s transcended their form.
And I’ve heard tell that Damon Albarn originally wrote it back in the 80s but only recorded it now.
For that matter, while listening to Cracker Island, I couldn’t help noting a resemblance to the topic of another music post a I wrote a while back.
That’s right. Even though it’s not billed that way, Cracker Island is an 80s-not-80s album.
Just listen to “Silent Running,” “Oil,” and “Tarantula” to hear what I mean.
But unlike Current Year retrowave artists, Damon Albarn has been in the business since before Ground Zero. So with this album, he’s managed more than a mere imitation of 80s pop style with better equipment. He’s broken through the dead end music devolved to in the 90s, picked up where the 80s left off, and blazed a new stretch of the same trail.
We’re starting to see more breakthroughs in other media, like little green sprouts poking up through the ashes of a forest fire. I’d call Gundam Hathaway the anime spiritual sibling to Cracker Island. Both contain source material written in the 1980s. Both push through roadblocks their respective art forms ran into in the 1990s. And both deliver dazzling results.
So give Cracker Island a listen.
One caveat: The people behind Gorillaz have made it pretty clear that they hate us, so get the album used.
And for even more musical fun this spooky season, enjoy the original theme from my new horror-fantasy book! Back the campaign to get the book before launch, and get the song, plus my acclaimed Soul Cycle eBooks, today! And that’s just the appetizer, since we’ve got a wide selection of sweet perks like the official T-shirt and signed books and posters!
So get your audiovisual Halloween treats. Back The Burned Book now:
The only thing I know about Gorillaz is that odd period where their animated band temporarily added a minor antagonist (he was generally too harmless to be really called a villain) from the Powerpuff Girls to the lineup.
That would be Ace from the Gangrene Gang. He briefly replaced the band’s founding bassist Murdoc, who was “indisposed at Her Majesty’s pleasure” on a weapons charge.
You can see Ace on bass in the Tranz video above.
I still can’t believe the guy who helped make Modern Life Is Rubbish, one of my favorite albums and the one that broke him to the mainstream, somehow fell into TDS. It’s like he forgot exactly what he was correctly describing in that album and the death of the world he loved so much.
Gorillaz were a weird project to me. I knew about them before the first album came out and hyped them up a good deal. I was actually big into Blur at the time, and liked old school hip hop, so the project was right up my alley. But between the self-titled and Demon Days he self-destructed Blur and took out Graham Coxon, their guitarist, putting out the band’s worst album and sending the band on hiatus for almost two decades. It was as if his ego had spun out of control in a way that not even Oasis could have matched. He forgot everything that made them what they were and lost their appeal. That kind of poisoned me on the Gorillaz project and I never really listened to them or Blur since Demon Days aside from random songs people sent me.
The new stuff does sound very good though, a real reflection of the times going back to pre-Cultural Ground Zero and attempting to build from there again. I hear the new Blur material is also great, perhaps a return to form as well. It would be nice to see a thriving mainstream music scene again, but I guess for now this is enough. It’s a definite improvement over how awful it all was in the 2010s, that’s for sure.
Never knew Albarn detonated his own band like that. I do recall hearing of some bad blood between them and Oasis over Blur’s relative failure to crack the US market. Maybe Gorillaz success scratched Damon’s ego a bit too much?
Either way, he does seem to have gotten over his political fit and sobered up to what an embarrassment it was.
The theory is that he was riding high off the surprise success of the first Gorillaz album and wanted to take Blur in that direction more, but it just didn’t take. Unlike Oasis or Supergrass, Britpop bands that ended with dignity, Blur flamed out in a way they shouldn’t have. Demon Days came out and was huge so it seemed as if that was the end of them since it was clear Gorillaz had more of a future.
Thankfully, that wasn’t the end of the story. He has since made up with Coxon and the band is back together again, their recent album even being pretty dang good, so it did work out in the end. It’s just a shame how long it took to patch things up.
There was something in the water in the music industry in the 2000s, and boy did it end up sprouting some nasty seeds in the decade to come. Hopefully that era is over with and done now.
All’s well that ends well.
Glad to see someone else give Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash a positive shoutout
There are people who don’t?
Damon Albarn and Co. might hate normal people, but he is arguably one of the top 3 songwriters of his generation. I lost interest in Gorillaz after Plastic Beach, but I’m a Blur lifer. Blur put out exactly one bad album (2003’s Think Tank, the one album released without Coxon, save one song he recorded before leaving,) and the rest, including the new stuff, is gold.
I guess I’ll have to check out Cracker Island after reading this post.
Never heard a Blur song I didn’t like. Their video for “Charmless Man” is the funniest I’ve ever seen.
Always thought it was a shame they didn’t make it bigger in the US.
Yes, Blur did have generally good videos as well as songs.
My theory as to why they didn’t hit it big in the US, and why their only hit was “Song 2,” is that Blur (a) didn’t fit neatly into any box and (b) they were too English. I mean that as a compliment, but I’m an Anglophile. Many are not. Englishness is lost on large swaths of America, and that’s fine because America is not England, cultural heritage notwithstanding.
“Song 2” and the album it was from, 1997’s Blur, was their “American” album: Coxon had gotten into American indie and hardcore, a love-affair that continued to give the rest of Blur’s stuff a harder edge, and Albarn went along with it. “Song 2” was intended as a parody of American music but it became their only American hit. Go figure.
However, the album unfairly became a “Used Bin” mainstay in music stores a la REM’s Monster, because the rest is typically eclectic, experimental Blur, albeit with a much darker mood, that doesn’t sound like “Song 2.”
Ah well. Their albums were always released here and when they toured here, it was in small clubs like where I got to see them in 2003 in Boston. Damon jumped into the crowd during “Girls and Boys” and he held out his mic to my brother and me so we could sing the chorus. He then gave us high-five and splashed water from his bottle on us. You could never see him in that intimate of a setting in England.
Wow. Didn’t know you got to have that kind of close interaction with him. Awesome!