From there, Gorillaz return to 2005 album ‘Demon Days’. Slaves and Slowthai burst that blissful bubble, bawling into Damon’s face and flouting social distancing rules like a 2020 fresher’s week, for the gloriously exuberant punk of ‘Momentary Bliss’. When Peter Hook arrives to play cumulonimbus bass on the superb ‘Aries’, Damon beams and shrugs through his euphoric twist on a New Order tune as if he knocks out such glacial indie-pop brilliance in his sleep. For ‘Dead Butterflies’, he teases emotive boudoir soul refrains from his keyboard, while Kano sits on a nearby riser paying tribute to the D-boss. On ‘Pink Phantom’ he duets with a cartoon Elton John, who sits at a grand piano festooned with a hairy hand candelabra. It’s a methodology that also needs focus, though and, without any old hits for us to synchronise with every now and then, this falls to Damon’s more crystalline moments in the spotlight. It’s a futurist, universal melting pot approach that allows Damon to get away with crooning a desolate melody amid the orchestral rhumba party of ‘Désolé’ merging JPEGMafia’s sunny rap with CHAI’s J-Pop on ‘MLS’ and creating a raging miasma of future soul at the start of EarthGang’s psychedelic disco groover ‘Opium’. Backgrounds: MONKE: RGB: Step 2 Upload a PFP Image Your image must have transparent areas for the chosen colour to show through and be square (1:1 Ratio ) Upload Image. These are tracks that often feel like classic funk, pop, rap and soul music intermingled, encoded, beamed out into the cosmos and deciphered by some far advanced civilisation. the ultimate Gorilla Tag fan site, as you can see theres a great big UNNOFICIAL on the logo, thats because is just that.
It’s like looking behind the Wizard Of Oz’s curtain to find there’s a wild-ass psychedelic punch party going on back there. Once Robert Smith has laced ‘Strange Timez’ with his aura of melodic anguish and holographic Beck has slipped’n’slid his way through the psych-pop ‘Valley Of The Pagans’, London singer Leee John twirls onto the cabaret stage in person, spinning falsetto soul harmonies over ‘The Lost Chord’. So, up close and exposed in the livestream format, and playing the new album largely in order (plus some bonus track swap-ins), they rightly embrace the anything-goes jumble behind the ‘toons. The cartoon wrapping of Gorillaz has always been there to give some form of coherence to a wildly disparate and dislocated sort of project, not least on their recent compilation of monthly lockdown tracks ‘Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez’. He raps into a megaphone, hammers keytars and parps toy trumpets in a bomber jacket, docker cap and glittery Elton pineapple shades, like someone sacked from Dexy’s Midnight Runners in 1980 for looking far too pleased with himself. And through the visual madness and sonic splatterfest grooves Damon Albarn, more rambunctious ringmaster than centrepiece.