CD Odyssey Disc 656: Gorillaz

I haven’t reviewed this next band in over four years, which just shows how long I’ve been at this damned CD Odyssey.

Disc 656 is…. Plastic Beach

Artist: Gorillaz

Year of Release: 2010

What’s up with the Cover?  This is what would pass for an island resort in a post-apocalyptic garbage world. Not terribly nice, and likely infested with rats or cannibals, but that’s what you get for booking without reading trip reviews first.

How I Came To Know It:  Sheila likes the Gorillaz and one day when I was buying myself some albums, I thought it would be nice to bring something home she would like as well, even if it wasn’t my first choice. That’s how I roll, at least on my better days.

How It Stacks Up:  We have three Gorillaz albums, and I’d put this one in the middle. Also, as this is the last Gorillaz disc in my collection, here’s the recap of how they stack up against each other:

1. Demon Days: 3 stars (reviewed at Disc 138)
2. Plastic Beach: 2 stars (reviewed right here)
3. Self-Titled: 2 stars (reviewed at Disc 74)

Rating:  2 stars but almost 3

I tend to only enjoy electronica when it is sidling up to generic pop music, and I find the Gorillaz a relatively painless listen for this reason. On “Plastic Beach” they are even downright enjoyable at times – just not at regular enough intervals. Like the flooded, doomed planet they depict on the album cover, the places where my ear can find a welcoming harbor are few and far between.

The album uses a number of guest vocalists, most notably (to me) rapper Snoop Dogg, seventies soul crooner Bobby Womack and alt-rocker Lou Reed. The Gorillaz are clearly interested in exploring music’s origins in multiple directions, and I appreciate this. Unfortunately, the various styles don’t always work.

Snoop Dogg’s appearance on “Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach” is one of the high points. The Gorillaz groove-based techno beats slide perfectly with Snoop’s rap style, and although I would have preferred this song with a real horn section, the way they use a synthesizer to get the same effect as a trumpet flourish works well enough.

Bobby Womack appears on a couple of tracks, to varying degrees of success. On “Stylo” he croons away over top of an undeniably cool beat. The beat on “Stylo” is so effective, the Gorillaz could’ve gotten away with just putting atmospheric sounds over top of it, and that’s pretty much what they do for the first half of the song. When Womack’s “110^th Street” power soul kicks in it gives the song a whole other facet. It is partly the pure and organic nature of Womack’s singing (and his understanding of how to slide on and off a perfect techno beat) that gives this song its spirit.

Unfortunately, later in the album the effect is slow and ponderous. On the wonderfully titled “Cloud of Unknowing” Womack attempts to deliver a heartfelt dirge, but the dead quality to the music sucks the life out of the performance, and left me wanting more.

As for Lou Reed – let’s just say this was not a match made in heaven. “Some Kind of Nature” just did not work. It felt like he was guesting on a digital version of the Muppet Show, minus a fun skit going on in the background. Even scratching his voice a bit near the end didn’t make it funky.

The best pure Gorillaz song is “Rhinestone Eyes” which has a great groove and (unlike most techno) thoughtful lyrics and may be the best song on the record.

Unfortunately, they can’t replicate this throughout. A lot of the songs feel like they never develop into anything, or worse they develop into an atmospheric collection of sound that had me glancing at my MP3 player 2-3 times for some songs wondering how much longer they were likely to go on. The worst offender, “Glitter Freeze” sounded like an electronica version of having your teeth drilled.

A much shorter album containing all my favourite tracks might have worked, but this record just takes too long to do what it wants to do. Ordinarily 16 tracks is two too many, but on “Plastic Beach” I’d say it is about six tracks too many. It isn’t that these songs are terrible, but they are too ordinary to be piled up to this height.

Thematically, I’ll give the Gorillaz credit for putting together what amounts to a concept album warning us about our society’s disposable culture and the reckoning that is coming when we become flooded in our own garbage. I love the effort, even if it didn’t fully deliver for me on the music front. This is at least in part because techno music doesn’t speak easily to me, so if you like techno beats, you will like this record more than I did. For all that, the songs I did like, I liked quite a bit.

Best tracks:  Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach, Rhinestone Eyes, Stylo, On Melancholy Hill