2. Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach - 3m35s
3. White Flag - 3m43s
4. Rhinestone Eyes - 3m20s
5. Stylo - 4m30s
6. Superfast Jellyfish - 2m54s
7. Empire Ants - 4m43s
8. Glitter Freeze - 4m03s
9. Some Kind of Nature - 2m59s
10. On Melancholy Hill - 3m53s
11. Broken - 3m17s
12. Sweepstakes - 5m20s
13. Plastic Beach - 3m47s
14. To Binge - 3m55s
15. Cloud of Unknowing - 3m06s
16. Pirate Jet - 2m32s
In 2000, Blur frontman Damon Albarn and comic book artist extraordinaire Jamie Hewlett unleashed their virtual pop band Gorillaz to a world that had no idea how to react. Their music has been described as zombie hip-hop, neo-pop, dark trip-hop and everything else under the sun. Producer Dan the Automator helped put together a 17-track debut album for cartoon characters 2-D (vox), Murdoc (bass), Russel (drums and percussion) and Noodle (guitar) to flaunt on a world tour.
Even more overwhelming than the idea of making four cartoon characters play extensive live shows - or their original backstory, which included Noodle FedEx'ing herself to the band, Russel being possessed by the spirits of his dead best friend and so on - was a seemingly endless list of guest stars, collaborators and contributors to their music. By the end of Gorillaz' self-titled first album, the audience has heard from Kid Koala, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, Miho Hatori and Ibrahim Ferrer. Not a bad start for four animated musicians' lives together, which were first spent (according to their videos) running from demons and trying to missile enormous moose on the highway.
Five years later, Damon and Jamie traded in Dan the Automator in favor of Danger Mouse to produce their follow-up Demon Days. Danger Mouse caught Gorillaz' attention by mashing up a cappella tracks from Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles' White Album and uploading them for free to the internet after receiving cease-and-desist orders from both groups' copyright holders. With Danger on board, Gorillaz began to close the gap on their lives after the initial seduction of fame.
After Russel exorcised his friend Del's spirit, Noodle learned a bit more English and Murdoc continued to beat the shit out of 2-D at every opportunity, the band was "destroyed by their own fame," according to a booklet handed out at a CD signing I attended with Damon, Jamie and Danger. This is evidenced most clearly in the band's lead single for Demon Days, "Feel Good Inc." In it, the band are seen practically forced to stay up with no sleep to play shows for posh hosts surrounded by passed-out partygoers.
If the guest list on Gorillaz was merely eclectic, the contributors for Demon Days seemed outright baffling. De La Soul, Neneh Cherry, Ike Turner, MF Doom, Shaun Ryder, Martina Topley-Bird, Roots Manuva, Booty Brown of Pharcyde, the London Community Gospel Choir and a spoken word piece by Dennis Hopper. Musically, it bent and Frankensteined genres left and right. "Last Living Souls" contained a Britpop verse, an acoustic-and-piano ballad breakdown and a dub finish. Second single "Dirty Harry" started as trip-hop, went completely classical (violins and all) for a bit before slamming into '90s-style rap. Borrowing samples from the original score for 1978's Dawn of the Dead and Salt n Pepa, it was an album that sounded all over the place yet, by the end, managed to come together in some strange cohesion that maybe only its songwriters truly understood.
Then, just as slowly as Gorillaz returned like zombies to the music scene, they faded away. Damon Albarn worked with Danger Mouse on The Good, the Bad and the Queen in 2007, put together an epic traditional Japanese play titled Monkey: Journey to the West a year or so after and even reunited Blur for a brief stint. Jamie did an incredible amount of artwork and set design for Monkey and kept busy and Danger Mouse also produced DangerDoom with MF Doom and Beck's Modern Guilt, co-founded Gnarls Barkley and worked with David Lynch on Dark Night of the Soul.
In the last month or two, leading up to the release of Plastic Beach, enough buzz and rumor has surrounded it as any album in the last 20 years. Murdoc, our only connection to the rest of the band, started a Twitter and tore down gorillaz.com. It slowly came about that he'd taken over an island of humanity's washed-up detritus, debris and garbage and set up camp there. The entirety of Plastic Beach, save a few guest spots, was recorded there. 2-D has been kidnapped and brought to the island and forced - at gunpoint - to record his vocals. Noodle was crushed by a lighting fixture after Gorillaz last show - 2-D's crazy ex-girlfriend was suspected, as was Murdoc's father - and Murdoc built an android replica of her using her DNA. This Noodle v2.0 (or TermiNoodle, as I like to call her) is allegedly evil and a bit of a slave to Murdoc. The video for their first new single, "Stylo," shows her get shot in the head at one point and just sort of break after having a full robot seizure.
And Russel is nowhere to be seen, on the album or elsewhere. "I had to record all the drums myself," Murdoc said in a broadcast recently. Then, however, amidst two dozen short teaser videos for Plastic Beach, the band members were featured individually in short videos. Murdoc was shot at by pirates, 2-D was gassed and brought to the island, and an angry Russel stormed down a dock past two elderly fishermen and dove into the water, presumably headed to meet the band.
For this third album, Damon took on the role of producer himself, and managed to roust a talent roster to outdo the first two. Three symphonic orchestras, Snoop Dogg, indie Brit rappers Kano and Bashy, synthpop act Little Dragon, Mos Def, "Across 110th Street" singer Bobby Womack (in his first recorded performance in 20 years, no less), Lou Reed, De La Soul, Gruff Rhys, Mark E. Smith, The Clash's guitar/bass duo Mick Jones and Paul Simonon and (on an as-yet-unheard track) The Horrors all work alongside a hostage 2-D, intimidating mastermind Murdoc and the underused guitar of Android Noodle.
On paper, it seems as though the boys behind Gorillaz have finally gone too far. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to hear the final version of Plastic Beach and am happy to put those fears to rest.
I had the distinct feeling from their debut that Gorillaz were interested in making three to five songs of three different genres each - songs like "Dracula," "Slow Country" and "Starshine" are very dub-centric, as "Clint Eastwood" and "Rock the House" are straight hip-hop. Plastic Beach follows a similar trend, if not as cut-and-dry - there are rap-heavy tunes; 2-D-based electro-pop or trip-hop tracks; and experimental guest star showcases.
For an album that starts almost identically to Demon Days, - a minute-long string-based intro track - Plastic Beach veers in such a radically different direction after its first 60 seconds it could make your head spin. To make its hip-hop mark, Snoop Dogg and a big brass section dominate "Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach," and are immediately followed by "White Flag," which is like dropping Dizzee Rascal into the middle of a Disney score.
All the rap tracks are actually right in the beginning of the album, unless you count the experimental "Sweepstakes" with Mos Def. Lead single "Stylo" features Mos Def spitting rhymes at its beginning and end, bookending amazing vocals by 2-D and Bobby Womack. "Stylo" is followed immediately by De La Soul's triumphant Gorillaz return "Superfast Jellyfish," which is as catchy and light as their contribution to Handsome Boy Modeling School's White People. "Superfast Jellyfish" is meant to be a commercial for a future breakfast food, says Damon - er, Murdoc...or was it Damon? Ah, hell, you get the point.
In between "White Flag" and "Stylo" near the beginning - and continuing to dominate the record after "Superfast Jellyfish" - is Gorillaz' 2nd style of track on Plastic Beach - 2-D at the helm of some of the lightest and most heartfelt songs he's ever sung. "Rhinestone Eyes" opens with an unassuming synthpop beat and quiet background acoustic guitar by evil Noodle, but later explodes as phat and toe-tapping as anything we've heard from the group. Likewise is "Broken," which rightly relies on a SoCal rap beat and 2-D's soulful, melancholy vocals to paint a picture of twilight and loss. 2-D's duets with Little Dragon singer Yukimi Nagano, "Empire Ants" and "To Binge," are already fan favorites and the album's only been streaming online for 48 hours.
Finally, Plastic Beach's oddities. "Sweepstakes," again featuring Mos Def, is a monotone attack on assimilation and bribery by anybody who wins a crowd over by making them feel like a winner, albeit of cheap plastic crap. It sounds like it would be at home on a latter-day Tricky album or as a Black Star b-side, but complements the remainder of the album well, much like their self-titled album had "Punk" and Demon Days's title track, which seemed bright and optimistic next to the darkness of other tracks. "Cloud of Unknowing" is the exact opposite Bobby Womack than what we heard on "Stylo" - where he was desperate, passionate and full of fury on "Stylo," here Womack sounds cautiously optimistic, melancholy and uncertain but unable to succumb to as such. "Some Kind of Nature" serves as a strange neo-pop duet between 2-D and Lou Reed, who has significantly calmed - but not cooled - since his experimentation on Metal Machine Music and Transformer.
There is too much fascinating music on Plastic Beach to describe here. The crashing stomp of "Glitter Freeze" that reminds one of Demon Days's "Every Planet we Reach is Dead," the early-'80s electro perfection of "Stylo," the old-school pop and funk of "Plastic Beach" - it's all phenomenal. Even album closer "Pirate Jet," which sounds at first like a cross between walking the plank and the score for A Clockwork Orange, soon takes on a near-political satirist comment with lyrics like "It's all good news now because we left the taps running for a hundred years."
I'm not sure Plastic Beach will sell as well as the rest of the Gorillaz catalog - their previous two albums have sold a combined 12 million units - but it demands hearing. Having listened to it and digested it a half-dozen times now, I find myself entreating you with the first thing I ever said to convince myself about it: "It has Snoop Dogg and Lou Reed on it, for Christ's sake!"
Plastic Beach is released March 3 in Japan, March 5 in Australia, March 8 in the UK and March 9 in USA.
