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Underground > Radio & Music >

Gorillaz are back!

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15:37 / 28.03.05

New video for Feel Good Inc. here.

Don't think it's as strong a first single as Clint Eastwood was, but damn, look at that animation (or as much of it as you can see with shitty streaming windows media...)

23:27 / 28.03.05

I wish it had a bigger resolution, but that's damn pretty. Although there's a different sound (And you can see the real person behind the words) it still retains the fantastic imagery by Jamie Hewlett.

I have to watch this again. I think the music is really enhanced by all the images.

And I love that they show 2D singing through a megaphone.

07:32 / 29.03.05

Damn fine video...and while I agree it's not quite up to Clint Eastwood standards, I find it extremely catchy. What's with those helicopters? Think they're going to do a storyline in the videos like Daft Punk?

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

13:02 / 29.03.05

Video & Song are out of control. Combine this with Dirty Harry and I am supremely liking the potential of Demon Days.

Gotta watch the video again.

Keith, like a scientist

00:33 / 30.03.05

yay, thanks for that!

love the animation. i'm ok with them showing De La as real people, cause they are guest and not the "band."

In case you haven't heard, this new album is produced by Danger Mouse, not Automator like the previous one...

08:46 / 30.03.05

That's great. I was totally unimpressed with the first album and actually sent it back to Amazon lol. But this is a great song and video. Very Miyazaki in the aerial visuals

15:33 / 30.03.05

Yeah, I definitely thought of Miyazaki too.

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

17:36 / 09.04.05

So, dunno if anyone else has, erm, come across the entire album yet (save that peskily malformatted and cut-short "Kids With Guns") but, wow.

Some very fine collabos on here (Exact Quote from Metal Face on "November Has Come": "No, fo'rilla? The Villain on a Gorilla jawn?"), all in all a much denser album than the eponymous debut. My personal favorite aspect, though, is this mini rock opera made up of the last three tracks: "Fire Coming Out Of A Monkey's Head" -> "Don't Get Lost In Heaven" -> "Demon Days". Replete with Dennis Hopper narration, choral choruses and poor 2D berating the USA for, far as I can tell, not helping him a better evening on the town. Dangermouse, apparently, wasn't finished riffing on The White Album when he finished The Grey Album.

My all out favorite track, though, is "All Alone" in which Roots Manuva, Martina Topley-Bird, and the Gorillaz wage war on your hapless subwoofer with just the most craziest dub beat you've ever heard. It's just incredible.

Much less of a collection of minted singles like the last one, this album is a ropey completely dubbed out linear traversing of one seriously peculiar evening. Thankfully, if you close your eyes you can still see all four Gorillaz hammering away at the album, as opposed to Damon and DM fiddling away at various knobs and MPCs, even with the abundance of guest spots.

Worth the leg work it will take to find it early (did I say legwork? just visit your local newsgrouporium) and definitely worth the full out purchase on 5/23.

Keith, like a scientist

19:34 / 09.04.05

birdie, i'm in the midst of ...er, listening...to this right now (wtf with kids with gun, yes).

and yes, All Alone is the standout killer-ness, I think. Still love Dirty Harry, but All Alone is amazing with it's martina topley bird and krunk-ness. totally brilliant beat.

haven't got to the mini trilogy opera you mention yet, but was perusing the forum as i was listening.

i'll be back, i'm sure.

06:51 / 16.04.05

I'm liking 'Feel Good Inc.,' but the chorus sounds remarkably similar to U2's 'Staring at the Sun.' It's probably just coincidence, but I was practically singing the Staring at the Sun lyrics the first time I heard it.

Also, is Del on the new album? If Automator isn't present, I get the feeling he might not be.

08:33 / 16.04.05

Thankfully, if you close your eyes you can still see all four Gorillaz hammering away at the album, as opposed to Damon and DM fiddling away at various knobs and MPCs, even with the abundance of guest spots.

I couldn't do that with Gorillaz in the past. Too much of its construction reminded me of Poochy from the Simpsons; hip hop's so hot right now, let's indie it up by about forty percent; dub's always added a touch of authenticity and class, worked for Massive Attack; it's gotta be pop, work on the chorus, make it catchy; Japanime's such a great look, let's add a little non-specific attitude from that Hewlett bloke; Automator's not available, how about that guy who worked on the novelty Jay-Z record, the one that mixed black and white and grey; if DJ Shadow doesn't want our money what does he want?!

It's one of the only times that an awareness of the mechanism of how the music is made has become totally intrusive into the way the it sounds for me. A lot of records come close: for example, there are aspects of the Handsome Boy Modeling Mess that really grate. Involvement with Automator at some point is usually fair evidence that what you're getting is designer rather than heartfelt. You have to be a little suspicious of a guy who jumps around from collaborator to collaborator, dropping glossy well packaged concept suites each time...

The issue isn't with pop, or with packaged pop. It's with that sense that something comes too complete and perfect, the angles are all covered and there's no manner in which you can interact with the finished article that hasn't already been anticipated. Nothing to tease out, nothing to surprise, nothing with depth and grit and unexpected edges.

To the active listener it's far less than the sum of its parts, and the joins are far too apparent.

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

20:37 / 16.04.05

See, that's exactly what I think the characters are supposed to be seen as doing. They're pop musicians cobbling together a whole shitload of stuff/influences into individual songs. Aside from the fact that they've spent the last three years getting coked up in Hollywood, I don't think they're really all that concerned about trendiness. Pop stardom came to them. I can't think of anything less commercial sounding than "Clint Eastwood". I was stunned when it started catching on. "Feel Good Inc" is also a wildly divergent song that sounds nothing like what's "hot" on the Billboard charts these days. It might sound like every other Baile Funk or Dub song, but I've only ever heard Piracy Funds Terrorism so I'm no expert on what's ahead of the curve.

As a pop band, I think they just as much soul and authenticity as other artists do. Maybe not as much as, I don't even know.

Do you really think DM and DJ Shadow are really that similar? Their production styles are vastly different, especially when comparing the work they've done for lyricists (Latyrx v. DM & Jemini).

Also, I like to think I'm a pretty active listener. I guess you can either buy into the conceit or not.

22:42 / 16.04.05

You have to be a little suspicious of a guy who jumps around from collaborator to collaborator, dropping glossy well packaged concept suites each time...

you do? why?

authenticity has a tendency to be boring, and the search for it doubly so. in my humble opinion, of course.

i thought the first Gorillaz album was just about perfect in every way, and i certainly don't think that made it any less interesting.

23:20 / 16.04.05

I agree with Seth. The first album, for me, was so careful in its construction that all I could see was the work that went into building it, not the building itself. The only track that didn't apply to was 19-2000, and then that was more by accident than design (and despite the general awfulness of Albarn's voice) - it was fortunate enough to be given a remix treatment that completely pulled it apart and built it up from the bottom, recognising the fundamental truth that any pop song can be made into something joyous as long as the la-la-lahs are given prominence.

On Albarn. What I was saying at the beginning of this post about always being aware of just how calculated this whole enterprise is, Albarn's voice has to take a huge portion of the blame for that. As ever, it's entirely void of any sort of feeling other than detached boredom and does more to push the listener away than anything else - the guy simply can't put even the tiniest smidgeon of emotion into his singing. It's cold and calculated, and that just adds to the feeling that this is a bunch of people who aren't particularly comfortable at doing this, who just don't find that it comes naturally to them.

Again, check the 19-2000 remix - Albarn's voice is a recognised fault and it's dealt with by both making the non-Albarn chorus the main point of the track and also turning most of his presence into a loop of a tiny sample. I'm pretty sure I'm right in saying that the tracks that proved most popular from the first record were Rock the House and the remixes of Clint Eastwood and 19-2000, and I don't think that it's coincidence that Albarn's role as a singer was either cut back in these or not present in the first place.

The other thing about this is that the tracks work much better when they've got a video to go with them, and I think it's fairly damning on the music that it's more appealing when your brain's splitting its workload between two different sensory elements. Hewlett's visuals could probably make anything appealing - it wasn't until I saw the video for 19-2000 that I paid the the single the slightest notice, and the same goes for the others. If he'd provided animations for the rest of the tracks on the album I'd undoubtedly like it a lot more. But he didn't, and on its own merits the music does very little for me.

23:22 / 16.04.05

authenticity has a tendency to be boring, and the search for it doubly so.

About as boring as the sound of somebody trying too hard, which is as basic (but accurate) a description of the whole Gorillaz project as I can think of.

Yotsuba & Benjamin!

23:58 / 16.04.05

About as boring as the sound of somebody trying to hard, which is as basic (but accurate) a description of the whole Gorillaz project as I can think of.

Because there's nothing harder than cartoon characters.

03:59 / 17.04.05

About as boring as the sound of somebody trying too hard

Gorillaz only sound like they're trying too hard if you yourself are trying too hard to find something to find something to bitch about. yes, there's clearly a lot of premeditation involved, like there is in any pop music, but like any great pop music, the finished product sounds effortless.

11:46 / 17.04.05

Gorillaz only sound like they're trying too hard if you yourself are trying too hard to find something to find something to bitch about.

Ah, cheers for clearing that up. It's good that somebody could point out that what I thought was a big long post detailing an honest opinion on why I think the Gorillaz thing is largely unsuccessful was actually no more than "bitching."

God forbid we should actually engage with posts expressing a different opinion to our own in the Music forum.

Keith, like a scientist

15:31 / 17.04.05

gorillaz are fun, people. it's not important mindblowing work (both automator and dangermouse both have done far more intricate and complex things), it's not innovative. it doesn't purport to be. It's FUN pop music. what's wrong with that?

Oh, and I've read that "feel good, inc." samples a Kinks song (Lazy On A Sunday Afternoon) in the chorus, so it's possible that U2 were just ripping off their much better predecessors.

myself, I love the Roots Manuva song, Feel Good, inc. and the Dennis Hopper one (wow, spoken word over pop music that doesn't annoy me).

15:49 / 17.04.05

I remember reading an interview with Damon Albarn about the recording of the first Gorillaz album. Apparently they went to Trenchtown, J, bought 'a suitcase of weed' and knew the record was finished when a) the locals were dancing along outside the studio, and b) they'd run out of dope.

I must have gone through that a couple of times, in an increasingly desperate search for a hint of irony, but, uh... Oh well.

If the rest of Albarn's real band weren't such sarky indie kid wasters, he'd have turned into Sting years ago, IMVHO.

As it is, he seems to have moved on from The Kinks to The Clash in terms of who he's ripping off, so that's progress of a sort, I suppose.

The video's excellent, but I'm not sure if the music would stand up on it's own, or if it's even meant to.

18:27 / 17.04.05

I have no interest in authenticity, and don't think Dangermouse and DJ Shadow sound at all alike. Now that we've cleared up the misread ass-scrapings...

gorillaz are fun, people.

Fine, if that's what they're supposed to be. But no-one in their right mind would say that listeners who found Gorillaz joyless and sterile were anhedonic, or had no sense of fun.

The point is that there are those who find them the exact opposite of fun: in this case, cold and calculated. It's the sound of dates put into diaries, of my people will call your people, of performances recorded in studios thousands of miles apart, of fun simulated with time and attention to detail.

It's the most strained effort I've ever seen put into "fun."

01:43 / 18.04.05

Involvement with Automator at some point is usually fair evidence that what you're getting is designer rather than heartfelt. You have to be a little suspicious of a guy who jumps around from collaborator to collaborator, dropping glossy well packaged concept suites each time...

Admittedly, I'm a huge Automator fan, but I really have to take issue with your point here. First, I love the fact that he works with so many different people on a variety of projects. Almost all musical people work in one genre pretty much, and to see Automator bringing a similar style to a multitude of genres is really interesting. Each of his projects sounds different, but he still maintains an authorial voice.

And as for the idea that his stuff isn't heartfelt, in public, he's definitely more about pastiche than any sort of serious discussion of the work, particularly with Handsome Boy Modeling School, and the skits and packaging of each album is sort of goofy, but the songs themselves are always appropriately heartfelt. I think his best work is Lovage, an album that I was expecting to like in a joking way, but ended up just loving genuinely. There's real emotion in those songs, as there is on Deltron 3030 or the new Handsome Boy. He creates designer personas, but not designer music, at least not in the sense that that's bad.

Regrettable Juvenilia

08:25 / 25.05.05

I've decided I really like 'Feel Good Inc': it's not so much a song that grew on me slowly as one that I changed my mind about quite a lot on the second or third listen. The De La Soul contribution definitely makes the track ("LININ EM UP LIKE ASS CRACKS!"), or maybe it's the video which is surely a new high for Hewlett in terms of animation, and I'd argue also a development for Gorillaz in that for the first time, what's happening in the video actually guides the audience in terms of how the song can (I'll refrain from saying "should be") interpreted.

10:14 / 25.05.05

Whoops. My fault for not hitting up the search engine.

To sorta parrot what I said in the other thread, really great album. Feels more cohesive than the last, minus tracks that ramble on for far too long.

I'm torn as to what should be my favorite track, actually. I guess I'll just have to like the entire thing.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

14:39 / 25.05.05

I wish there was some way I could have Damon Albarn's existence removed from my brain with mindrubbers, because I really like this track, but find his trying so hard to be really offputting.

Regrettable Juvenilia

15:12 / 25.05.05

Really? What I find interesting is that the character of 2D in general and the video for 'Feel Good Inc' in particular seems to portray a caricature of the most pathetic aspects of Albarn-as-we-know-him (and of course, we don't). Maybe he's merely wallowing in his own crapulence, but I dunno... I do find it fascinating to see it addressed. There he is, trapped in a hell of his own making, contributing vocal vaguaries and only able to gape in awe at De La Soul - who, do you see, are more "real" than him - or at the pastoral beauty enjoyed by the Japanese girl from the band. Or something.

17:15 / 25.05.05

I hated 'Feel Good, Inc.', but then i heard all of it with De La Soul and I really like the bit with De La Soul. Do you see?

I may have been better disposed if Albarn hadn't gone "windmills" and then Look! A windmill! Really? It's like when the news has a story about fishcakes, and there's a picture of a fishcake.

05:09 / 26.05.05

I may have been better disposed if Albarn hadn't gone "windmills" and then Look! A windmill! Really? It's like when the news has a story about fishcakes, and there's a picture of a fishcake.

Wouldn't that be more Hewlett's fault than Albarn's, though?

08:17 / 26.05.05

Yeh, but Albarn was the one who actually said "windmills." I don't really think Hewlett pulled a gun and was all like I wanna fucking draw windmills! Sing about windmills or a can't draw them! Windmills, shitface!! Albarn is entirely culpable for the word "windmill" which is, incidently, a really fucking annoying word on its own, without a fucking diagram, in my face, fucking telling me what a windmill is incase read so many copies of The Face that my brain fell out of my noise, crying.

And, like, whatever... I'm not blaming Hewlett. I like to think of him as hating the entire exercise, wanting to run away and live in a log cabin and make real art out of animal skins, wood and pigments, yet forced by goonish wankzips to participate in a pitiless theater of cruelty who, berefet of inspiration or hope, heard "windmill" drew windmill, having been beaten into a literallist-minded pulp of dispair by all the dope.

I feel fully justified in making up whatever reality I like about the Gorillaz. That is their point.

20:40 / 26.05.05

2D... Trapped in a hell of his own making

It's probably instructive at this point to think about the disengaged drummer, the comically, sleazy drugged-out bassist, and the guitarist who appears to be in a world of his or her own, out on a limb from the rest of the group.

I'm in two minds about recommending this, what with it being that bloody idiot's show and all, but there was a very telling interview with Damien and Jo Whiley on Radio 1 the other day, which if nothing else has a really good heavy dub version of 'Clint Eastwood' on it somewhere, off the first pointless, existentially futile album the Gorillaz made, but still... I'm sure it's downloadable, and it's highly worth a shot.

Y'know, IMPHO.

11:58 / 27.05.05

And, like, whatever... I'm not blaming Hewlett. I like to think of him as hating the entire exercise, wanting to run away and live in a log cabin and make real art out of animal skins, wood and pigments, yet forced by goonish wankzips to participate in a pitiless theater of cruelty who, berefet of inspiration or hope, heard "windmill" drew windmill, having been beaten into a literallist-minded pulp of dispair by all the dope.

Meh. I imagine, though I may very well be wrong, that the process was not nearly so convoluted as that. Could've been something like Hewlett was watching too much Miyazaki the day he put together the storyboards for the video, and "windmills" served as a convenient way to get that shit up in the air.

It could be said that video directors go so far out of their way to avoid being labeled as literalists that the final product bears no connection to the song besides the fact that it's playing in the background. I, personally, would love to see a group of videos that are just completely literal. God knows it might actually make some of the stuff out there interesting.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

13:35 / 27.05.05

Hell Yeah!

I'd like to see the Bukkake video for "Come on Eileen".

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

15:45 / 31.05.05

Well I thought it was funny.

Fuck you all.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

06:56 / 01.06.05

As far as the first album goes: the best Gorillaz track is "Dracula", which is dubby as all fuck. B-Side of Clint Eastwood.

The second best Gorillaz track is either that crazy little punk pastiche (uh, "Punk")or the one that samples the opening synth score from Day of the Dead (and admittedly that's only because the DotD OST is so fucking great) "M1-A1".

08:44 / 01.06.05

I dare you to deny that "Sound Check (Gravity)" was a great mixdeck/unplugged guitar mash-up.

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