Songwriter’s melancholy lingers in Gorillaz album
I confess: I’ve never been able to sustain deep interest in the elaborate fictional universe of Gorillaz, the virtual, cartoon-character band conceived in 1998 by English songwriter Damon Albarn and the comics artist Jamie Hewlett.
Twenty years into Gorillaz’s career, Hewlett’s online visual chronicles have been inventive and fun, but Albarn’s songs have been deeper and more durable.
Most often, Albarn’s music has been a counterpoint to the rest of Gorillaz’s presence: melancholy and introverted alongside Hewlett’s antic, allusion-laced animations.
And the melancholy is what lingers.
Among all of Albarn’s diverse projects — including the Britpop band Blur, which made him a star in the 1990s; collaborations with African musicians; and full-scale European and Chineseinfluenced operas — Gorillaz became the blockbuster.
Its first two albums sold in the millions worldwide, carried by singles such as the 2005 track “Feel Good Inc.”
Generally, long gaps have separated Gorillaz studio albums. But its sixth one, “The Now Now,” appears a little more than a year after “Humanz.”
The surface of the new songs is glossy and tuneful, with bubbling synthesizers and knowingly retro echoes of the 1970s and ’80s. Not far underneath it are the deep misgivings that Gorillaz has never exactly hidden.
Gorillaz gives Albarn a flexibility that has turned out to be quite shrewd. The project hands over Albarn’s songs to Hewlett’s imaginary, multiethnic and conveniently ageless band: the brain-damaged English singer and keyboardist (and Damon Albarn, the mastermind behind the virtual band Gorillaz The new Gorillaz CD: “The Now Now”
Albarn surrogate) 2-D, the towering AfricanAmerican drummer Russel Hobbs, the young female Japanese guitarist Noodle and the roughneck English bassist Murdoc Niccals.
(Current Gorillaz lore has Murdoc imprisoned after being framed for drug smuggling; his replacement, to trivia lovers’ delight, is Ace from the Powerpuff Girls’ band).
Previous Gorillaz albums, including “Demon Days” and “Plastic Beach,” have contemplated recent or impending societal and environmental catastrophes. But “The Now Now” has more private concerns. Throughout the album, Albarn is a man on his own, lonely and in motion.
He might well be a pop star on and off the road; more than one song places him among the luxuries and seductive unreality of Los Angeles.
“Calling the world from isolation,” he sings in the album’s opening song, the ironically upbeat “Humility,” which is laced with breezy George Benson guitar fills. Hewlett set its video on a Los Angeles beach.
In “Magic City,” a shimmering
processional, Albarn observes, “I filled the canyons with my ego / Look, there’s a billboard on the moon.”
And in “Souk Eye,” a plush Latin-electro ballad, he’s in Los Angeles again, pledging “stone love” to someone before noting, “I got to run soon.”
There’s autobiography, or at least a travel diary, in the songs. The titles include “Hollywood” as well as “Kansas” and “Idaho.” (The credits say the tracks were demoed in hotels in those places.)
Plush, majestic major chords waft around Albarn’s voice in “Idaho,” where he seeks the repose of natural beauty but finds “Out there in the wilderness, another bullet hole.”
But on “The Now Now,” distance doesn’t let him escape his regrets. Over a steadfast, trudging beat in “Kansas,” Albarn mourns “the memory of my fall from grace in your eyes,” and vows, “I’m not gonna cry.” He’s even more bereft and apologetic, though cushioned by synthesizers and backing vocals, in “Fire Flies,” a not-quite-waltz that has him wondering, “Am I losing you?”
Gorillaz’s video escapades offer diversion and cover — and emotional deniability — from such troubled thoughts, but Albarn’s songs don’t hide them. In the mysterious chemistry of songwriting, the partnership with Hewlett’s visuals has been a reliable catalyst. Behind the cartoon mask, there’s freedom.