Gorillaz: Cracker Island review – smaller, subtler, and better for it

(Parlophone)
Damon Albarn has reined within the excess – although there are nonetheless cameos from the likes of Dangerous Bunny and Stevie Nicks – for a trim album that is likely one of the band’s greatest

Right here’s a sobering thought for anybody old enough to recall the early 00s first-hand: Cracker Island arrives 22 years on from Gorillaz’s debut single, Clint Eastwood. Based by Damon Albarn, an alt-rock star apparently dabbling in pop, and his former flatmate Jamie Hewlett, who provided the cartoons, it was a venture you may need assumed can be a short-lived joke. However almost 1 / 4 of a century on, Gorillaz have made as many studio albums as Albarn’s main band and, within the process, have achieved things Blur haven’t: a string of US Prime 10 albums, certainly one of them double-platinum; a Grammy; and entente cordiale with Oasis – or a minimum of Noel Gallagher, who appeared on 2017’s We Acquired the Energy.

They’ve also proved oddly prescient. You don’t hear many bands who sound like Blur lately, but we stay in an era when pop is fuelled by the type of cross-genre collaborations that began popping up on Gorillaz’s eponymous debut album and had kind of consumed their output solely by the discharge of 2010’s Plastic Beach. In fact, their present prevalence in all probability has extra to do with making an attempt to recreation the streaming providers’ genre-specific playlists than Gorillaz’s influence, but nonetheless. You possibly can see the mark their tracks Feel Good Inc and Soiled Harry left on Gen Z’s nascent musical style by the truth that Gorillaz are still enjoying arenas and headlining festivals years after their albums stopped shifting in the type of quantities they once bought; final yr, Billie Eilish stated Albarn “modified my life” when she invited him to sing Feel Good Inc together with her at Coachella.