gorillaz - plastic beach

(Note: Starting now, every Friday will be a new blog post, while every Tuesday will be one of my column pieces.)

I have a rather large music collection. Large as in 30,000+ songs. Large as in 78.7 days worth of music. Pretty huge.

The upside of this is that every time I go through my library, I can find amazing new music I’ve never heard before.

The downside of this is that I rarely have free space for new albums.

For this reason, I’ve never listened to a single track from Plastic Beach, despite the fact that it was ridiculously hyped for nearly a year and was finally released to a ravenous public all the way back in March, reaching number two on the Billboard 200 in the process.

So, here for you today, I’m going to review said album, completely free of all outside influences—no prior hype or disappointment to take into account. A natural review of a major release, purely on its own merits.

Let’s do this.

---

Plastic Beach is a lot of things.

It’s a concept album, as far as I can tell, but what that concept actually is, I have no idea.

The name “Plastic Beach” implies a kind of futuristic, dystopian landscape, an image that clashes with many of the sounds on the album. At times the Gorillaz production team lays out dense, futuristic sounds with heavy synth lines, while other tracks carry sunny hooks over fluttering melodies, seemingly at home on a regular beach as opposed to this plastic one.

It’s simply unclear what this album is supposed to be.

While “Demon Days” was a complex album that took numerous listens to unravel, “Plastic Beach” just comes off as sheer overkill—too many styles, too many cameos, nothing really singular about the album at all.

Plastic Beach has one of the most impressive guest lists I’ve ever seen, yet the majority of the stars enlisted for the project do remarkably little to help it. In the case of Lou Reed’s cameo on “Some Kind of Nature,” it actually hurts the song. (I love you Lou, but you gotta stop.)

Mark E. Smith, Mos Def, and De La Soul all make honorable contributions, while the mini-Clash reunion on the title track is almost unnoticeable, and Snoop Dogg seems to have stopped by the studio with no real idea what the album was about. (. . . I mean, I don’t know what it’s about either, but still, you’d think somebody would’ve clued him in.)

In the midst of what does turn out to be an incredibly lush, vivid album, the guest spots just end up as distractions. The finest tracks on the album are the ones where Damon Albarn (of Blur) and whoever else makes up the fictional Gorillaz band take front and center.

“On Melancholy Hill” and “Rhinestone Eyes” are the runaway highlights, and they feature nothing but flowing electronic production and Albarn’s vocals.

You can’t help but think that the album as a whole would have improved from this simpler treatment. The Gorillaz project just seems to have taken over the actual musical qualities of the album, which is a shame.

- 10/25/2010