Mark E. Smith welcomes you to a beautiful electronic planet.
Gorillaz albums have always been a place where your quiet and alienated weird side can come out of hiding and hang out. That why, even though there's better music out there, I seem to keep coming back to Gorillaz songs more than seems due. It's makes sense that the band is composed of animated characters- this is music for your alter ego.
The new Gorillaz album, "Plastic Beach", is maybe the band's most welcoming and heartening yet. This is despite the fact that, unlike Gorillaz' more varied past albums, it's purely electronic music, which tends to be cold and alienating. Unlike a lot of electronic music, Plastic Beach doesn't make harsh demands that you dance or oppress you with stale electronic beats. And it doesn't create insubstantial electronic atmospheres that you need ecstasy to be immersed in.
Instead, the electronics cooly unfold to create colorful landscapes upon which vignettes are played out by the Damon Albran and the albums amazing set of guest artists. There's the lost highway of "Stylo" (see the music video) with Bobby Womack and Mos Def as the voices in your head as you drive, De la Soul sit back and talk shit at a pregame party or a lazy Sunday on "Superfast Jellyfish," and Snoop Dogg sounds like an otherworldly flight attendant on "Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach." (Is Soul Plane 90 minutes of that? Hmm, maybe I will see it after all.)
Unlike some electronic albums where there's excess attention shown to how the sounds are chopped and sliced together, Plastic Dreams doesn't show indifference to how the individual noises actually sound by themselves. This is particularly true of the guest vocalists; you get the sense that Albran isn't as interested in what they're saying as how they sound when they're saying it. The album warmly welcomed my old soul personally with a Mark E Smith guest appearance on "Glitter Freeze," and just like on his Fall records, the attitude in his delivery is so transcendent that it almost doesn't matter that you can't hear what he's actually saying.
This is an album where you'll definitely have personal favorite tracks that are endearing in some particular way. Maybe's it's the Middle Eastern time-warp on "White Flag," or the futuristic tourist ad featuring half of The Clash on "Plastic Beach." My personal favoriteis "Some Kind of Nature," where Lou Reed plays the old, deadpan drug-mystic that William Burroughs used to play on his old spoken word tracks, talking about needing to "protect the girls from the spiritual poison you expel at night." A lot of albums just have guest artists show up basically as cameos- and a few of the artists on "Plastic Beach" are literally "phoning it in," meaning that they're being recorded talking on the telephone- but its sounds like Albran has carefully chosen each artist for each track. Mark E Smith, who is the God of England, lords over an electronic cataclysm on his track and proclaims that it is a "Glitter Freeze." It's really works. It certainly isn't a case of bringing Kanye West on a track because you can.
People might say that there are better electronic albums out there from samplers like Ratatat, but I don't know- there's something oppressive and mechanical about their albums. Listening to them is like being trapped in a drawer with some guy's record collection: there's interesting stuff here and there, but only sheer darkness lies in between and beyond the individual sampled sounds. Electronic music has become our anti-life minimalism, like modernist architecture. In our time, they seem to say, there is the refuse of the past to sift through like some post-apocalyptic junkyard, and there is nothing else.
On the other hand, in terms of welcoming electronic atmospheres that feel fluid and expansive, Plastic Beach is like Brian Eno's Another Green World with a blockbuster budget. There might be better albums coming out this year, but very few that you'll play as much.
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