- Plastic Beach
- Gorillaz
- Parlophone/EMI
In the nightmare we're having, the riches of the Earth are all turned into garbage. In the one we're waiting to have, the last polar bear looks over the water from the last bit of melting ice cap.
Gorillaz is supposed to be a cartoon band, and in their new video (for the single Stylo), the bratty manga boys run a wild video-game car chase with Bruce Willis. But the backstory for the present disc is that they have retreated to a remote luxury villa on an island made from garbage.
After a few songs about plastic food, lottery winners and distant sweatshops, it's obvious that we lucky folk in the consumer society are all on that island. "We left the taps running for a hundred years," Damon Albarn sings in the closing Pirate Jet. The bummed-out lyric is sweetened with tinkling xylophone, glossy organ and twangy jaw harp.
Plastic Beach is both a dystopian screed and a call to party. Sure, the world is going to hell, but in the meantime people carry on with their private dreams and love affairs. The personal, the public and the hedonistic all jumble together, just like the album's fitful but controlled strains of R&B, dance electronica, world beat, rap and pop. The chorus of Broken, a cosmic meditation on the fall of man, abruptly veers into thoughts on the end of a relationship. Empire Ants gently mourns "the emptiness we leave behind," then revs up to a disco beat that could signify the route of escape, or the emptiness itself.
Given the album's concept, it's no surprise that Albarn relies heavily on synthesizers and drum machines. Sweet, saturated flavours predominate, just like at the fast-food counter. But a string orchestra opens the disc and returns in Cloud of Unknowing for a portentous chorus with soul singer Bobby Womack (like Cee-Lo Green in Gnarls Barkley, he's this album's earthy R&B ballast). An Arabic ensemble holds down the rap number White Flag.
The disc is chock full of guests, including rappers Mos Def and De La Soul, Swedish pop vocalist Yukimi Nagano and singer emeritus Lou Reed, who mostly speaks his part in Some Kind of Nature. Whoever's on the mike, Albarn's ability to move the body and broker between styles is impressive. The love duet To Binge sounds like an Englishman's loungey tribute to French yé-yé pop, with a doo-wop feeling and a beat cribbed from Somethin' Stupid. And you know what? It's a really good song.