Gorillaz - Song Machine Season One: Strange Timez

The Guardian 80

(Parlophone)
Damon Albarn’s cartoon band mark their 20th anniversary with a record whose star guests – Elton John, Robert Smith and St Vincent among them – are folded into a fluent, brilliant whole

Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s Gorillaz project has sold tens of millions of albums, spawned No 1 singles, broken America in a way no Britpop band (including Blur) ever managed, won awards, headlined festivals, spawned its own festival – Demon Dayz – and staged vast transcontinental arena tours. All this without it ever becoming clear what Gorillaz is supposed to be. An alt-rock star’s extended sneery joke at the expense of manufactured pop? A catch-all repository for a musical polymath’s teeming multiplicity of ideas? An act of self-indulgence, or a brave, boundary-pushing experiment that sometimes works to startling effect and sometimes very publicly fails?

At various points since their 2000 debut, Gorillaz have encompassed all of those things: they have lurched from feeling like a stoned folly to a brilliantly inventive reimagining of what a pop band can be; from a postmodern gag to the source of evidently heartfelt concept albums about environmentalism and the apocalyptic tone of life in the 21st century; from being the object of Noel Gallagher’s derision to featuring Noel Gallagher as a special guest.

Thu Oct 15 11:00:22 GMT 2020

The Guardian 80

(Parlophone)
Damon Albarn is the melodic anchor to this pioneering album that balances concept with fun

The Now Now (2018) was one of those Gorillaz albums that dispensed with the hip hop-led collaborations that have often defined this band of ink and flesh. Guests are in full effect, though, on its follow-up: what’s billed as Season One of the band’s Song Machine concept, compiling the tracks Gorillaz have released monthly via their YouTube channel since January, plus extra helpings.

Everything that has ever been engaging about Gorillaz is present in spades here. Playfulness and conceptual ambition are all anchored by Damon Albarn’s melodic melancholy and his side-eye at the suboptimal state of things. His Bowie fixation waxes hard on unreleased tracks – such as The Lost Chord – as well those already in the public domain (Aries).

Sun Oct 25 09:00:04 GMT 2020