Gorillaz's sixth album is the comedown after the party
If you’re looking for sunshine in a bag you may not find it on Gorillaz’s sixth album. With a work rate we’ve come to expect from musical polymath Damon Albarn aka 2-D, The Now Now arrives just a year after the star-studded Humanz, which was perhaps the Gorillaz’s album that took sensory overload to the very max.
For the cutely titled The Now Now (no doubt, a jaundiced comment about instant gratification) Albarn has cooled his jets on a record that seems more meditative and, well, calmer than the skittering madness and manic glee of the cartoon band’s previous work.
Following a mind-boggling range of guest vocalists over the years, it’s also Albarn’s album through and through. Jazz smoothie George Benson turns up on the tropical pop of Humility to lend some of his mellifluous runs, and Snoop Dogg and early House music pioneer Jamie Principle crop up to add extra sleaze to Hollywood, a squelching and strutting tale of America’s sin cities.
Albarn, free of autotune, has reverted to his sad ballad man persona for much of The Now Now. On One Percent he sounds spaced out, submerged in a sea of synths and arcing sound effects. He’s at his most world-weary on Fire Flies, a smouldering tale of abandonment, which possibly recounts the end of a friendship (an Album speciality).
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The Now Now is also somewhat of a travelogue on which he, to borrow the title of a Blur song, looks inside America: on the atmospheric and glistening Idaho he’s lost in a reverie as he stares out of the window of the Gorillaz’s tour bus, taking in silver lakes and rainbows, while on the slow jam of Kansas, Albarn is on his "journey home, with no fuel, alone."
Elsewhere, Tranz locks into a hypnotic groove and charts the slow simmer of a post-gig comedown. Nobody does introspection and solipsism quite like Albarn and he’s captured that feeling of constant motion and unreality superbly.
As he half sings, half speaks on Humility, "I’m the lonely twin, the left hand. Reset myself and get back on track. I don’t want this isolation. See the state I’m in now?" Beautifully melancholic introspection loves company. Climb on board that tour bus.
Alan Corr @corralan
