Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

Sometimes I must truly give mad love to the internet. Until about the middle of last week, I'd forgotten entirely about Gorillaz. As I've previously written, I was a huge fanboy of the group in their heyday. The whole project made a succession of hits with a formula pretty much engineered to avoid pop conventions, and for a while they were one of the most commercially and critically successful acts on the planet. To see an album featuring a pile of classic MCs like MF DOOM and De La Soul doing strange, narrative song fragments over a multi-genre soundscape hit the top of the charts was pretty mindblowing.

Gorillaz has always had problems, though. The broad scope of the project always lead to issues with consistency. Their self-titled debut is a phenomenal collection of singles (the Del the Funky Homosapien guest cuts "Clint Eastwood" and "Rock the House" spun on the radio and TV all the fucking time) without a shred of stylistic or thematic consistency. There are a thousand different genres and a thousand different stories going on within the 15 tracks and while nearly every song holds up on its own, as a consummate piece it's too challenging for most casual listeners and has a lot of potential it never lives up to. By the time the follow-up Demon Days popped up, Damon Albarn and artistic collaborator Jaime Hewlett had spent plenty of time developing the whole "fictional musicians existing in the same universe as actual famous musicians" concept and turned it into this wonderfully strange sort of comic book alternate reality. Demon Days reflects this solidified concept quite heavily, and it suffers musically because of its strict adherence to being a piece of narrative fiction along with being an album. There's the usual batch of genius singles (try getting "Feel Good Inc" or "Dare" out of your head), but still the album itself alienates the listener unless they're in on the gag.

Plastic Beach had a great pre-release marketing campaign. Combining a whole slew of gorgeous new Hewlett illustrations with a massive and very difficult online game, Albarn and company captured my attention immediately after I discovered this new disc's existence. A lot has gone down in the Gorillazverse since Demon Days (Pint-sized Japanese guitarist Noodle is dead and in hell and replaced by an android for some reason, drummer and spiritual medium Russell has somehow grown huge after ingesting some toxic shit, etc.), so this sudden burst of content has proven necessary to set the stage for the album's release. On top of the usual narrative hijnks, Albarn has also found a new passion in the study of ecology. Observing landfills and impoverished communities in Mali, Albarn speaks of having discovered how the infamously derided amounts of excess plastic littering the planet have become a part of nature (specifically citing, of all things, "snakes like living in the warmth of decomposing plastic bags"). It's a strange idea, but Damon Albarn has rarely ever been a pop auteur one could call straightforward.

The sad thing is that Plastic Beach starts off incredibly weak. The orchestral intro is a decent enough way to kick things off (although a tad uninspired sounding), but the first proper track disappoints on such a massive level that it was a major blow to my high expectations for the disc. It's sad when a track featuring the likes of Snoop Dogg is terminally boring. The beat is great, but Snoop drops some wack and needlessly sparse rhymes. His flow lacks his usual musical drawl and the brief bit where he finally gets into the groove near the end is too little too late. Luckily, this misstep is followed by one of the disc's most out there (and most brilliant) tracks. Kicking off with a mellow string/percussion jam sounding like something out of every stereotypical film depiction of the Middle East, Lebanon's National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music somehow manages to back British grime MCs Bashy and Kano on "White Flag". The duo are some solid rappers, with slick flows and some clever lyrics. If they haven't collaborated before this, then they would do well to consider doing so again sometime. The interplay between them is stellar and one of the album's finest moments.

Much noise has been made on the 'net and elsewhere about Plastic Beach's lead single, "Stylo". It's easy to see why. Featuring a soaring, soulful chorus by the long retired Bobby Womack (Albarn claims this is the first studio recording he has performed on in at least 15 years) and an inventive, well shot video (featuring Bruce goddamned Willis chasing the band down a Mad Max-esque desert road with a massive handcannon and bitchin' muscle car). The pulsing electro beat has the best hook of any pop single I've heard this year, and on top of Womack's electrifying performance we get nice work from Albarn on the mournful verses and Mos Def providing a distorted vocal hook as bookends to the track. I can't say it's quite on the level of the group's previous leading singles, but it's still a damn good track and one of the better things on the charts these days.

The rest of the guest tracks vary quite wildly in both tone and quality. De La Soul make a glorious reappearance spitting their usual endearing nonsense over a wonderful pop landscape constructed by Super Furry Animal alumnus Gruff Rhys on "Superfast Jellyfish", Mark E. Smith phones it in by occasionally speaking over the annoying throb of worthless filler track "Glitter Freeze", Lou Reed (yes, that Lou Reed) does his wonderful crazy old man thing over galloping piano chords on the toe-tapping "Some Kind of Nature", Mos Def either bores or delights depending on your taste in the shambling, unpredictable "Sweepstakes" and (quite possibly the biggest and best surprise of the disc) Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of The Clash fame lend their unmistakable sound to the schizophrenic stomp of the vocodered to hell and back titular song.

Of exceptional note above all other guests, though, is Swedish electronica act Little Dragon. Providing the instrumental backing and some extra vocals for a pair of excellent tracks, Little Dragon are one of the only acts on the album who really feel like they're doing their thing with Albarn rather than Albarn having them do his thing. The entire disc has a pervasive, disappointing feeling that even at their best, most of the guest players really are just guest players rather than genuine collaborators unlike Dan the Automator, Danger Mouse and Del were on the previous discs. I guess that is to be somewhat expected given how this album is very much Albarn's baby, featuring a fairly high ratio of tracks of him as a solo vocalist and a concept he has made it clear he is exceptionally passionate about. On that note, the Albarn solo tracks this time around are actually a bit better than usual. While he's knocked it out of the park before ("Punk", "M1 A1", "Hong Kong", "Bill Murray"), "Rhinestone Eyes" and "On Melancholy Hill" are pretty much perfect. Placed impeccably between the myriad guest songs, the two tracks serve well to keep the album's forward momentum going when it begins to lag and demonstrate Albarn has never lost his ability to work pop wonders with that detached, otherworldly groan of his.

Altogether I don't quite know what to make of Plastic Beach. It's thematically consistent, that's for sure (really, find a track on there that somehow doesn't tie in to Albarn's ecological obsession, winner gets a no-prize), and there are a few moments where the music really shines, but largely the disc falls short of your expectations. I can't quite call it bad, because it isn't. For what it is, it's great, and even judged on conventional merits there are a few tracks here that are genuinely amazing. Perhaps everything will be put in perspective when the inevitable B-sides and unreleased material comp drops (every other Gorillaz disc has had such a companion, and it's been widely reported waaaaay more stuff was recorded than what ended up used), but for now Plastic Beach feels just a wee bit too high concept to be enjoyed as a pop record and far too poppy to sell itself well as a serious commentary on environmental issues. Damon and company have perfected the formula they were crafting with Demon Days, but in order to maintain listener interest we're going to need to see the great singles of days gone by come back.