There are two dials at Gorillaz HQ which decide 1) what number of visitors will probably be on an album, and a couple of) how elaborate its broader cartoon lore will probably 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. Alternatively, 2020’s wildly overstuffed Tune Machine challenge, 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 lots 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 Tune Machine earlier than being reworked as a conventional 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 house on, effectively, a Tame Impala document. Earlier Gorillaz LPs suffered from guest-spot whiplash: Right here’s Pusha T and Bobby Womack, and now on the stage is Elton John, girls 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 Women was briefly within the band?) Cracker Island, the fictional place, is house to a crazed cult, and reachable solely through submarine. A few of the document’s extra deranged metaphors will go away these in Gorillaz’s on-line cult reaching for narrative clues. However probably the most cartoonish factor concerning the precise LP is its wildly various musical palette. Albarn, working with Adele producer Greg Kurstin, fills the document with trilling metal drums, baleful mariachi horns, even a playful riff on the iPhone’s default ringtone.
At 10 tracks and clocking in beneath 40 minutes, that is Gorillaz’s tightest LP, and but its sense of goal offers 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,” whilst he gazes on the hydrofoils on the horizon, the seashores nonetheless strewn with plastic. For all of the document’s sonic pleasures, Gorillaz’s issues with Trumpism and local weather collapse are extra to the fore than ever. And but Albarn can’t assist however conclude on a hopeful be aware, duetting with a barely-there Beck that “we’re on this collectively/until the top.” Twenty years and eight albums in, you consider him.