Culture Blues

Music: “Plastic Beach” – Gorillaz

I am surprised that there aren't more virtual bands in today's Existence 2.0. You would think with all of the accessibility to Flash and desktop recording that there would be an endless procession of incorporeal musicians cluttering the ever expanding multimedia landscape, yet outside of Dethklok (Brendan Small is AWESOME), Crazy Frog, Genki Rockets, and Mistula there aren't really any legitimately successful groups of this ilk. That is, other than Gorillaz. Born in 1998 from the disenchanted brain of one time fame-whore and Blur frontman Damon Albarn, and the skilled artistic hand of English comic book artist/designer Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl), Gorillaz was conceived as a response to the increasingly vacuous nature of said era's musical panorama. With a fresh and wildly inventive synthesis of hip-hop, funk, alternative, world, pop, and electronica, combined with a wonderfully stylized animated quartet consisting of 2-D (vocals, keyboards), Noodle (guitar, backing vocals, possibly trapped in hell), Russel Hobbs (Percussion), and Murdoc Niccals (Bass, demon summoning, kidnapping), Albarn & Hewlett have pushed the limits of the music meets fiction experiment to astounding levels.

With two chart-topping studio albums under their belt (absurd fact: those two records have outsold Blur's ENTIRE catalogue here in the U.S.), and a deep and rich mythos surrounding their fictitious personas, the Brit duo have finally graced us with a follow-up to their Grammy winning multi-platinum smash Demon Days. The British media have already dubbed it one of the greatest post-millennium records and, while it is really quite good, they are overstating things a tad.

Plastic Beach is an album that began to kick around in Albarn's head in 2008 as he was sitting on a beach (imagine that) near his home. "I was just looking for all the plastic within the sand," he said in an interview with The Guardian. The idea was then refined after a trip to Mali where he was taken to a landfill; he went on to describe how he saw people "taking every little bit, a little bit of fabric to the fabric regenerators, or the metal and the cans to the ironsmiths and the aluminum recyclers, and it goes on and by the time you get to the road, they're selling stuff." These concepts were then juxtaposed against the way that his own country deals with detritus and, viola, an album came to be.

Inspiration firmly in place, it was then time for some music making. There are no guest producers on Plastic Beach (Albarn mans the console and reportedly played all the instruments), but that is the only aspect of this album with one cook. Plastic Beach features an eclectic list of cameos that will leave you out of breath before you can rattle them all off: Snoop Dogg, Gruff Rhys, Lou Reed, Mos Def, Mick Jones + Paul Simon, The Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music, Sinfonia Viva, and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, just to name a few. Obviously working with all of these different artists, and writing such a varied record, can present a massive set of problems not just for the album, but for the listener as well. Thankfully, the finished product is a masterful example of what a collaborative effort can be (much like Dark Night of the Soul, a record reviewed in our site's infancy). Albarn manages to create a record that is focused and flows, while never losing you in a disparate haze.

Plastic Beach begins with a lush orchestral piece gliding in on the surf surrounding the fictional garbage island; there are even seagulls (that's how you know it’s art). After the intro, the tension is brought forth by a brass burst that leads into a mellower-than-usual Snoop Dogg (who literally phoned in his contribution) 70s R&B groover, with Albarn's digitized harmonies accompanying the flow. Track three opens with a Middle-Eastern doumbek rhythm, which writhes its way into a whirling flourish of strings and winds, before making a hard left to a pirate-ish sample and some guttural cockneyed rapping provided by Grime stars Kano and Bashy. It isn't till the fourth track, Rhinestone Eyes, that Albarn does some real singing, and the record makes a pronounced shift at this point. Albarn's cadence and delivery is by no means the stuff of the previous emcees (that's not his "thing"); instead we are treated to the daydreaming poetry that probably made Graham Coxon leave Blur. Stylo comes next, and it is a real mystery to me: I think it is one of the weakest tracks on the record, yet it was released as the first single. There is nothing about it that is transcendent or inspiring, and it comes off as a bit of a snoozer.

The middle tracks are where the album truly shines. With superb cuts like Superfast Jellyfish, Empire Ants, Some Kind of Nature, and On Melancholy Hill, we listeners are treated to a diverse array of amalgamated elements, styles, and compositions all crackling with inventiveness and artistry. There is head-nodding, ludicrousness, retro-neon-grind, re-imagined L.E.S. chic, and classic Anglo-sadness with an 80s bent that even I can appreciate. Each song has something that makes it standout. Once you hear Mos Def's second contribution, Sweepstakes, you have heard the best of Plastic Beach. Though the last few tracks lack a little luster, there is a redeeming sonic moment within just about all of them, mostly due to the absolutely staggering production job.

In closing, I would say that if I was handing out a letter grade to Plastic Beach it would be a B+; a very strong and respectable grade that just about any student would be happy with. The room for improvement essentially comes down to the slight disconnect which I feel exists between this record and the concept that is Gorillaz; there is nowhere near enough of the fiction! The thing that keeps this record from utter greatness is the feeling that this really is Damon's side project, as opposed to a band fronted by 2-D, which is what he wants us to believe.