I have been assigned the great undertaking of reviewing this album. It contains sixteen tracks of music. It gots people like Snoop Dog, and Mos Def, and Gruff Rhys, and Lou Reed, and The Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music. And other people.I've been a pretty big Damon Albarn fan for awhile. I love the other two Gorillaz albums, and I love The Good, the Bad, and the Queen, and i think i like that last Blur album they did.
This album initially started as some project called Carousel, and then became some other project that was still going to be Gorillaz that Damon Albarn apparently recorded something like 70 tracks for, and then became this. After i found that out (right now), the result seems a bit underwhelming when it seems like it's been worked on for forever.
On the first listen, almost the whole album didn't catch my fancy. The only part i wanted to listen to was the orchestral intro that breaks into a sweet Snoop Dogg throwdown. But, since i told myself i would write this thing, i've listened to it probably like seven times already. It's totally grown on me. It was too electronic and soulless and empty to me to start. It's a very electronic, guest starry, hollow take on what the Gorillaz were in Demon Days. I fucking love Demon Days. If you havn't listened to that album yet in your lifetime get on it. Demon Days took some of the best parts of all kinds of music and squashed it together. This takes that crazy instrumentation with live instruments and replaces it with drum machines and dance hooks. And it's sweet, once you get it.
The part that sold me the most, upon further listens was the underlying theme, or the plot of the thing. The cool thing about Gorillaz is that Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewitt created this animated band that they could use to tell stories with and create weird cryptic themes with, that run through entire albums. From the start you hear waves and seagulls and things that puts you in a cinematic mindspace, then runs you through this adventure of the Gorillaz on a giant plastic beach island resort built with garbage. Even though it sounds long winded, it works because each song is self contained. It's poppy, but there's more meaning to it. Or something.
The plastic beach thing is freaky. Apparently there are loads of beaches and landfills made entirely out of garbage, but the surrounding environment has created a habitat out if it. The idea behind the album seems to be that even though we think the world is fucked environmentally, we can go beyond that now, knowing what fucks up the world, and being mindful of it. Meanwhile still enjoying life on Earth, despite it being a garbage hole.
I totally figured that out on my own, even before i read this quote from Albarn:
"They've got more snakes... like adders, grass snakes, slow worms, toads, frogs, newts, all kinds of rodents, all kinds of squirrels, a massive amount of squirrels, a massive amount of foxes, and obviously, seagulls. [...] This is part of the new ecology. And for the first time I saw the world in a new way. I've always felt, I'm trying to get across on this new record, the idea that plastic, we see it as being against nature but it's come out of nature. We didn't create plastic, nature created plastic. And just seeing the snakes like living in the warmth of decomposing plastic bags. They like it. It was a strange kind of optimism that I felt... but trying to get that into pop music is a challenge, anyway. But important."
And that's how awesome i am.
And i give the album 1000 rupees / 7 crayons.
boom done
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