Gorillaz - Humanz

The Guardian 80

Covering everything from mental health to military interventions, Damon Albarn and his celebrity friends deliver an inspired party album for a world gone mad

It is easy to forget that, on arrival in 2000, Gorillaz looked suspiciously like a self-indulgent novelty turn, the kind of project record labels feel impelled to let rock stars do when they’ve shifted so much product that “no” isn’t really an option any more.

It was a Britpop frontman and his artist flatmate’s sneery joke at the expense of manufactured pop, with cartoon figures replacing the hapless, manipulated band members and interviews conducted, a little wearyingly, in character. You would have got pretty long odds on it still existing 17 years on, longer odds still on their fifth album being a politically charged conceptual work that variously touches on the topics of racism (courtesy of rapper Vince Staples on apocalyptic choir-assisted opener Ascension), mental illness, the pernicious influence of the internet “echo chamber”, western military intervention in the Middle East, the “alt-right” belief that China has fabricated global warming, and the importance of soul music in the Thatcherite heartlands of 80s Essex (the improbable latter topic surfaces on a lovely track called Andromeda, named after a defunct Colchester nightclub, which also finds Albarn ruminating on the deaths of both his partner’s mother and Bobby Womack over a four-to-the-floor house beat and frail electronics).

Drowned In Sound 70

At the time this seemed like a slightly dickish but fairly acceptable thing to do, partly to differentiate the project from Albarn’s then still active other band (that’s Blur, btw), partly because British chart music was so boring in 2001 that a bunch of lairy toons were a blessed distraction. It’s also worth noting that it was easier to maintain the aesthetic charade of Gorillaz being a four-piece virtual band back when they had fewer people involved – their triple-platinum debut album only actually had two named guest performers on it, neither very famous, and there was no need to find a way of styling out having Bobby Womack or Sean Ryder on your song.

In 2017, 2-D et al still exist on some conceptual level – for starters Albarn clearly uses a different singing voice for Gorillaz to his other projects – but the days when journalists had to pretend to talk to drawings are long over. As such promotional interviews are now rather more illuminating, and it was interesting to read the band’s recent Stereogum chat_ and gain some insight into Albarn’s process – writing dozens of songs and reaching out to vast number of guests, shrugging and carrying on if they say no.

For fourth album proper Humanz, talks were held with Morrissey and Dionne Warwick, who said no in the end but might have completely changed the feel of the record if they’d been on it. Artists as popular as Carly Simon and Rag’N’Bone Man are relegated to the bonus tracks on the deluxe edition.

In a sense, Humanz is less an old-fashioned album, more a very expensive giant mixtape, a densely sparkling cloud of ideas and collaborative wish-fulfilments, loosely delineated by a bunch of skits, and bound by Albarn’s keyboards, shared session musicians (most notably souly backing vocalists) and more coherent production than many modern hip hop or pop records, with Albarn, The Twilight Tone and Remi Kabaka credited as producers of every song. It’s a more upbeat, party-orientated record than the dreamy Plastic Beach, and perhaps more so than before Gorillaz manage to pull off a balancing act between harking nostalgically back to a bygone era of vintage soul and clean, upbeat hip hop, and seeming entirely of the moment. They’re retro, but retro is big in the ago streaming, the house band for the current climate of everybody-likes-a-bit-of-everything, perma-shuffle hyperactivity, giving patronage to artists like Vince Staples or Popcaan who were born after Blur formed and would doubtless never get within earshot of that band’s white, middle-aged, British fanbase if it weren’t for this record.

Perhaps the sense of it being mixtape-like is compounded by the relative absence of Albarn-as-2-D. He’s still very much there, but there’s the sense that with each Gorillaz album that goes by he’s content to fade out of sight a little more: the band is so defined by collaboration that it’s easy to forget he was lead singer on ‘Clint Eastwood’, ‘Feel Good Inc’, ‘D.A.R.E.’, even ‘Stylo’, but increasingly he feels more like the curator than the singer: it’s not until track four, the swaggering trap of ‘Saturnz Barz’ that he makes a really meaningful vocal contribution, his wistful “I’m a debaser… I’m a heartbreaker” verse beautifully undercutting guest Popcaan’s autotuned bombast; you’re talking track ten (‘Andromeda’) before you can really say he’s on lead vocals.

It never feels incoherent, thanks to the constancy of the vintagey soul-plus-bloopy electro production/instrumentation, but Albarn’s self-relegation as lead singer has perhaps robbed it of genuinely great melodic pop moments (the closest being perhaps Patti Smith Group-ish closer ‘We Got the Power’, featuring Savages’ Jehnny Beth and – as has been widely noted – Noel Gallagher). There are some absolute bangers here, mind – the propulsive ‘Ascension’ (featuring Vince Staples) is a thing of metronomic wonder, like being zapped with a very pleasant machine gun, while the edgy sort-of-gospel of ‘Hallelujah Money’ (featuring Benjamin Clementine) is brilliantly awkward, knotty and political, a cold shower at the end of all the fun.

Humanz is good, because Gorillaz are good, and it distinguishes itself by probably being the band’s most party-orientated record, which is great. But ultimately it feel like Gorillaz are now more curators than provocateurs, locked into a classy, comfortable groove. We'll see them again next decade, no doubt, ageless as ever.

Pitchfork 69

In the spring of 2016, Damon Albarn tells Pusha T to picture, if he would, an album that envisioned Donald Trump winning the presidency. Albarn was working on new Gorillaz material, the first in six years, and he had been squinting at the man brandishing his shriveled claws at his Republican challengers and bragging about his dick size and imagining him in charge of the free world. “When it really happened,” Pusha T said, “I was like, ‘Wait a minute…I started wondering like, what type of crystal ball did this guy have?”

It’s a funny little anecdote, considering how closely the fifth studio album from Gorillaz resembles its predecessors in tone, style, and mood. The cartoon-band project of Albarn and Jamie Hewlett has evolved into a surprising little institution by relying on a sturdy formula: Return every few years with an album loaded up with au courant guests and a doomsday vibe that fits whatever disaster is currently dominating the headlines. Post-9/11 panic? Great Recession malaise? Trumpian discontent? Gorillaz have a song for that somewhere. Hitting play on a Spotify blender of Gorillaz will take you across eras, continents, genres—Bobby Womack will show up, as will Lou Reed and Ibrahim Ferrer and Tina Weymouth. But somehow, it will all sound like the inside of the same suburban-mall Gamestop, circa 2000. Damon Albarn’s vague ideas about societal passivity and dystopia feel roughly the same now as they did around the release of the first Gorillaz album, and they will probably feel the same in 2028, when President Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is running for reelection.

As usual, the guest list on Humanz promises untold riches—Vince Staples, Danny Brown, Kelela, Pusha T, Mavis Staples, D.R.A.M., and Jehnny Beth from Savages—on which the music doesn’t deliver. No matter the rotating cast, Gorillaz tracks come in a few basic colors and flavors: A stew of fat drums, gloomy synth patches, crooned and muttered hooks from Albarn in the background. With this reliable frame, every guest ends up smeared with Gorillaz makeup and bearing a whiff of Suicide Squad-style corporate menace.

Humanz mostly feels like a playlist as a result, with each song acting as a self-contained referendum on how this particular guest fares in Gorillaz World. Vince Staples sprints his way through “Ascension” without finding much traction in his surroundings. The joy and weightlessness that Popcaan brings so naturally to his usual guest spots is extinguished by the the drizzly murk of “Saturnz Barz.” De La Soul, who showed up on Gorillaz’s 2005 hit “Feel Good, Inc.” and on Plastic Beach, are jostled by a clomping, inelegant beat on “Momentz” that gives them none of the room to sound effortless or funny or wry or observant. They sound lost in the middle of the wrong party.

“The wrong party” or “the right party” is a useful Gorillaz rubric. Grace Jones is at the wrong party on “Charger,” which introduces you to a wriggling little two-note worm of a guitar lick before Jones shows up to mutter a few words. Neither she, nor Albarn, nor that wiggling guitar, seem to have thought of much else to hold your attention. Danny Brown and Kelela are at home on the clanking synth-popper “Submission,” pitching in measured jolts of wistfulness and pop-eyed panic. The Chicago legend Peven Everett sounds fantastic on “Strobelite,” spilling effortless warmth all over the track. Singer and rapper and Virginia ham D.R.A.M. is at the right party, pitching in stacked, breathy multipart harmonies behind Albarn’s lead vocal, on “Andromeda.”

But the sneaky star of that song is the streaking comet-trail synth that repeatedly claims center stage. It sounds thick and wispy all at once, a lovingly rendered globule of sound so dazzling it turns everything around it superfluous. Guests may come and go, but Albarn’s menagerie of pawn-shop synth gear remains the reason the party exists. The most powerful and heartfelt moment on all of Humanz comes when all the humans disappear, and Albarn is left to himself to croon sadly to his machines: “Busted and Blue” could have been a song on the last Blur album. It explores similar feelings of glassy-eyed melancholy and resignation. And most importantly, it sounds gorgeous, full of digitized finger snaps that spiral out like space junk drifting across the atmosphere. The synth washes here feel like orchestral string sections, and as the emotion intensifies the flimsy Gorillaz pretense burns off again, as it does on every Gorillaz album: All the masks and cameos aside, this still feels like a Damon Albarn solo project, a place for him to treat the studio like the welcoming arms of oblivion, and for us to join him.

The Guardian 60

(Parlophone)
Gorillaz’s on-trend party album brings reassuring strangeness and a clever use of collaborators, but little real-world clout

“The sky is falling baby/ Drop that ass ’fore it crash,” chants Vince Staples on the nagging Ascension, the first song on Gorillaz’s soundtrack for a party at the end of the world. Billed as a nonstop, 125bpm-and-over playlist, the return of Gorillaz after seven years largely delivers on the promise of a rolling vibe – one with a scream emoji hovering just in the wings.

Front and centre, fun is available; “millennialz” are definitely invited to this nearly 20-year-old project. Damon Albarn, Jamie Hewlett and a huge cast of well-chosen guests layer on-trend pop tropes over myriad iterations of danceable music, through choices that are always just a touch left-of-field. Lead single Saturnz Barz is a haunted house of trip-hop, featuring paranoid verses courtesy of feted young Jamaican MC Popcaan.