What do you get when you combine road trip malaise, one fancy touch-screen gadget and a slew of musical talent and instruments?
You get the latest Gorillaz album, The Fall. It’s a risky move to bank on novelty as the driving force of an album, and it goes about as far as it can with a hodge-podge of quirky bits and indulgent experimentation.
On Christmas Day 2010, the album debuted online as gift to the band’s fan club members with an intriguing back story: All 15 tracks had been recorded on front man Damon Albarn’s iPad during the band’s North American tour. Ambitious, considering most people play the alphabet game or nap on the road.
No doubt you have a junk drawer at your house filled with odds and ends, some of them tiny treasures in their own right, some of them absolute junk.
The Fall is an audio version of that junk drawer, with some pieces clearly better than others.
As soon as “Phoner to Arizona” kicks off, you know you’re in for something strange, and it plays like a tune Beetlejuice has on vinyl. Listen closely, and you’ll hear the faint echoes of a recycled beat from “Don’t Get Lost in Heaven” off their 2005 album Demon Days. It’s subtle enough that catching it proves to be a pleasant surprise.
“The sun has come to save me/ put a little love into my lonely soul,” Albarn croons on “Amarillo,” one of the album’s gems. A song about lost love and moving forward features Albarn’s melancholy vocals paired with a slow, synthy beat, making it one of the more substantive tracks.
But “Amarillo” – a truly beautiful, well-made song – fades into “The Speak It Mountains,” which starts with at least three disembodied voices saying over and over: “The air is thinner. It is the dawn. Time has shifted. It is the dawn.”
Listen to it if you’ve never had a freaky dream, because that’s what it sounds like. So, thanks for canning that experience into a track, Gorillaz.
Creepy sound effects aside, some of the tracks just don’t feel finished. They bleed into one another, and the absence of lyrics in most of the songs puts a lot of pressure on the looped beats – pressure they collapse under.
Oh, and Bobby Womack shows up, too, in “Bobby in Phoenix.”
In a completely uninspiring performance, Womack either wrote or was given a very boring set of lyrics – “Let’s talk about feelings/ It’s got a way to helping you to breathe a little better” – that sound suspiciously similar to his part in Plastic Beach.
“What the hell. Let’s just have Bobby Womack sing for a little bit,” is what I imagine Damon Albarn said as he crafted the track list.
That should probably be qualified with the fact that Womack does indeed have an excellent voice, but it brings up a bigger problem with the album’s cohesiveness.
The ingrained cacophony and the often playful but vacuous rhythms make for a listening experience that falls short.
So what to do with The Fall? Well, it was made on an iPad, so that’s cool, but what’s not cool is riding that novelty-wave to get your $12. Those who enjoy musical curiosities should give it a whirl, but this is one of the Gorillaz’s side projects that is okay to skip.
2.5 out of 5 stars
