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

(Parlophone)
Damon Albarn has reined in the extra – though there are still 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 undertaking 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 course of, have achieved issues Blur haven’t: a string of US Prime 10 albums, considered 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 Power.

They’ve additionally proved oddly prescient. You don’t hear many bands who sound like Blur today, but we reside in an era when pop is fuelled by the sort of cross-genre collaborations that started popping up on Gorillaz’s eponymous debut album and had kind of consumed their output totally by the release of 2010’s Plastic Beach. In fact, their current 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 still. You possibly can see the mark their tracks Feel Good Inc and Dirty Harry left on Gen Z’s nascent musical style by the fact that Gorillaz are nonetheless enjoying arenas and headlining festivals years after their albums stopped shifting in the type of quantities they once bought; last yr, Billie Eilish stated Albarn “changed my life” when she invited him to sing Really feel Good Inc together with her at Coachella.