There are two dials at Gorillaz HQ which decide 1) what number of visitors shall be on an album, and a couple of) how elaborate its broader cartoon lore shall be. 2018’s The Now Now, positioned as a solo album by Damon Albarn’s “2-D” alter ego, had minimal visitors and solely the slightest little bit of extra-textual hijinks. However, 2020’s wildly overstuffed Track Machine undertaking, wherein each observe was accompanied by at the very least one visitor and a brand new cartoon detailing the band’s ongoing dystopian adventures, turned each dials to 11. Each observe was a single, bursting with set items and pivots; all of it “labored,” but it surely was so much to absorb, like a 12-course dinner composed of all entrées. One can solely eat a lot lobster.
The brand new Cracker Island — initially begun as “Season Two” of Track Machine earlier than being reworked as a standard album — turns each dials to a snug center setting and cruises. It’s the easiest-going and most purely pleasurable Gorillaz album since their opening one-two punch, 20-some years in the past. Friends really feel purposeful, filtered into the indie-funk melange with ease. Thundercat will get to uncork some strolling bass traces over a Daft Punk-worthy mirrorball groove, and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker trades verses with the Pharcyde’s Bootie Brown on a synth-pop scorcher that’d be at residence on, properly, a Tame Impala file. Earlier Gorillaz LPs suffered from guest-spot whiplash: Right here’s Pusha T and Bobby Womack, and now on the stage is Elton John, women and gents. Right here solely two stick out, with songs constructed to reap the benefits of their incongruity. The Dangerous Bunny collab “Tormenta” pilots the band’s kick-drum-fueled dirigible to the Caribbean, discovering a reggaeton riddim for the MC to do backflips on, and “Oil” enlists Stevie Nicks, whose inimitable countermelodies assist the band discover hope amid (per the lyrics) “interlocking cluster bombs like bass and drums.”
Make no mistake, that is nonetheless a Gorillaz LP, and the band’s broader saga has not let up a bit. (Do you know somebody from the Powerpuff Ladies was briefly within the band?) Cracker Island, the fictional place, is residence to a crazed cult, and reachable solely through submarine. A few of the file’s extra deranged metaphors will depart these in Gorillaz’s on-line cult reaching for narrative clues. However probably the most cartoonish factor in regards to the precise LP is its wildly diverse musical palette. Albarn, working with Adele producer Greg Kurstin, fills the file with trilling metal drums, baleful mariachi horns, even a playful riff on the iPhone’s default ringtone.
At 10 tracks and clocking in underneath 40 minutes, that is Gorillaz’s tightest LP, and but its sense of goal provides Albarn some room to breathe, to sing and sigh and weave little melancholy melodies about our “cracked-screen world” into the twisted, Hanna-Barbera milieu. He’s clearly having enjoyable, chanting “ape!” within the synth-punk freakout “Skinny Ape” till it twists right into a pitch-shifted “oi,” at the same time as he gazes on the hydrofoils on the horizon, the seashores nonetheless strewn with plastic. For all of the file’s sonic pleasures, Gorillaz’s considerations with Trumpism and local weather collapse are extra to the fore than ever. And but Albarn can’t assist however conclude on a hopeful word, duetting with a barely-there Beck that “we’re on this collectively/until the top.” 20 years and eight albums in, you consider him.
