Gorillaz’s “Plastic Beach” funky, fresh

The last time I heard about the Gorillaz, they had departed completely from their
2005 album “Demon Days” and were producing Chinese operas about Buddhist monkeys seeking nirvana. Crazy shit.

For all intents and purposes, I assumed the Gorillaz were dead. Its founding members Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett having moved on to bigger and crazier things with the release of the 2007 circus opera “Monkey: Journey to the West.”

When I heard the Gorillaz were in the process of dropping a new album, I was a bit skeptical. “Monkey” entailed men on stilts dressed in silk costumes enacting the fairyland of a 16th century Chinese novel. Then I heard Bruce Willis is starring in its new single’s music video with a .357 Magnum and a nitro-fueled car chase, and figured I’d give the album “Plastic Beach” a try.

Band persona Murdoc Niccals wrote on the Gorillaz’s official news site that “Plastic Beach” was intended to be a worldwide collage.

“Via the guests I brought in and used, I could take little snapshots of the world …  It’s just a picture. Plastic Beach: it’s another place, another way of looking at the world,” he wrote.
Having experience with collaborating with a number of artists on “Demon Days,” and having been traveling the world for the better part of the past four years, Albarn and Hewlett wrangled 15 contributing artists’ into the new album — the diversity shows.

 “Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach,” the second track on the album, introduces you to the first guest vocal artist: granddaddy Snoop Dogg. Snoop opens the album with his own style of beats and gangsta funk, resonating of the Gorillaz’s earlier albums.
After a few songs, the album dives off the deep end into what Niccals describes as ‘crack funk’ with the album’s most hyped single “Stylo.”

This is the single — its video featuring Bruce Willis kicking ass.

The darkest track on the album, the politically charged lyrics of “Stylo” rings of the overpopulation of the planet, and that we are “Coming in on the Overload/ Overload /Overload.”

The track was good enough to entice Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Bobby Womack into recording his first vocals since 2004. His voice explodes over the grimy synths in the beat.

“Glitter Freeze” brings post-punker Mark E. Smith of Britain’s The Fall — it is exactly what you would expect to hear when a project like the Gorillaz crosses paths with the chaotic noise makers of Britain’s punk boom of the ’80s: an instrumental lined on all sides with the noise of pissed off synths and drum machines.

With the range of sound encompassing everything from the classical to the crazed, there is almost too much variety on the album.  With 16 tracks, all having different influences and artists, sitting down and listening all the way through took some effort. I skipped a lot of tracks while going back to listen again, mainly because the good is jumbled up with the bad.

Some of the collaborations were amazing, but others are left lacking. The coherence between the tracks suffers due to the gaps between styles.

While the purpose of this is to provide a small snapshot of the world, the medium of a studio album limits the Gorillaz’s ability to  tie the experience together into a single package.

Overall, there is a lot of the old Gorillaz in the album. A heavy use of funky synth beats and trippy electronic rhythms shines through almost every track. Their sound is mixed with the styles of a crazy range of artists, and some completely new things come from it.

It’s worth checking out if you’re looking for some new sounds.