Gorillaz: Demon Days (original) (raw)

Most musicians have their own toy boxes, the places they hide away all the obsessions and experiments that don't fit comfortably under the umbrella of their main projects. Compared to other artists', Damon Albarn's playroom chest must be filled to bursting: the cultural drawer cluttered with horror films, anime, and rock'n'roll stereotypes; the musical drawer crammed full of dub, hip-hop, dancehall, and afropop. In fact, Albarn seems to have so many creative distractions tempting his muse, he can't even keep them from occasionally invading the conservative environs of his day job-- each Blur album manages to squeeze in at least one ill-fitting endeavor like Think Tank's "Crazy Beat".

Fortunately, Gorillaz provides Albarn an outlet to vent his taste for sci-fi kitsch, and satiate his urge to break free from rock with guitars-- and it's a surprisingly successful outlet, at that. (Did anyone really expect an edgy street-cred Banana Splits to be worth discussing four years into its discography?) Rather than falling flat, Gorillaz have strangely become a therapeutic and clever way for Albarn to subvert the usual egolympics associated with a solo project. Coyly hiding behind Jamie Hewlett's thick-inked pop caricatures and a phalanx of guest stars, Gorillaz allows Albarn to practice self-indulgence under heavy personality camouflage-- though never so heavy that there's any question as to who's really pulling the strings.

Like the Gorillaz's self-titled debut, Demon Days goes the way of most auteur projects, its oversize idea load making for a trip equal parts peak and valley. But also like the debut, Demon Days is better than it has any right to be, featuring singles stronger than anything released under the Blur banner since, you know, that "Woo-hoo" song. For a project that could easily have been little more than Damon Albarn Remakes "Ghost Town" 15 Times (With More Rapping & Cartoons), this is a follow-up that proves Gorillaz, weirdly, has legs-- not that the four-year break hurt any.

In order to keep things fresh, however, Albarn made a few exchanges at the hip-hop Wal-Mart, trading in his sputtering old Dan the Automator model for Danger "as seen on CNN!" Mouse, and swapping out Del tha Funkee Homosapien for MF Doom and... Dennis Hopper. These new collaborators add more to the proceedings than just increasing the comic-dork factor by about 10, particularly Danger Mouse, whose colorfully dense production helps buoy the occasionally slight genre sketches scripted by Albarn and his fleet of retro keyboards.