(Parlophone)
Damon Albarn has reined in the excess – though there are still cameos from the likes of Bad Bunny and Stevie Nicks – for a trim album that is one of the band’s best
Here’s a sobering thought for anyone old enough to recall the early 00s first-hand: Cracker Island arrives 22 years on from Gorillaz’s debut single, Clint Eastwood. Founded by Damon Albarn, an alt-rock star apparently dabbling in pop, and his former flatmate Jamie Hewlett, who supplied the cartoons, it was a project you might have assumed would be a short-lived joke. But nearly a quarter of a century on, Gorillaz have made as many studio albums as Albarn’s primary band and, in the process, have achieved things Blur haven’t: a string of US Top 10 albums, one of them double-platinum; a Grammy; and entente cordiale with Oasis – or at least Noel Gallagher, who appeared on 2017’s We Got the Power.
They’ve also proved oddly prescient. You don’t hear many bands who sound like Blur these days, but we live in an era when pop is fuelled by the kind of cross-genre collaborations that started popping up on Gorillaz’s eponymous debut album and had more or less consumed their output entirely by the release of 2010’s Plastic Beach. In truth, their current prevalence probably has more to do with trying to game the streaming services’ genre-specific playlists than Gorillaz’s influence, but still. You can see the mark their tracks Feel Good Inc and Dirty Harry left on Gen Z’s nascent musical taste by the fact that Gorillaz are still playing arenas and headlining festivals years after their albums stopped shifting in the kind of quantities they once sold; last year, Billie Eilish said Albarn “changed my life” when she invited him to sing Feel Good Inc with her at Coachella.
Continue reading...by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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