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

(Parlophone)
Damon Albarn has reined in the extra – though 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

Here’s a sobering thought for anybody sufficiently old 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. But 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 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 no less than Noel Gallagher, who appeared on 2017’s We Received the Power.

They’ve also proved oddly prescient. You don’t hear many bands who sound like Blur today, however we stay in an period 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 present prevalence in all probability has more to do with making an attempt to recreation the streaming providers’ genre-specific playlists than Gorillaz’s affect, however nonetheless. You'll be able to see the mark their tracks Really feel Good Inc and Soiled Harry left on Gen Z’s nascent musical taste by the truth that Gorillaz are still enjoying arenas and headlining festivals years after their albums stopped shifting in the sort 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.