 | Tracklist:
1. Orchestral Intro
2. Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach
3. White Flag
4. Rhinestone Eyes
5. Stylo
6. Superfast Jellyfish
7. Empire Ants
8. Glitter Freeze
9. Some Kind of Nature
10. On Melancholy Hill
11. Broken
12. Sweepstakes
13. Plastic Beach
14. To Binge
15. Cloud of Unknowing
16. Pirate Jet
Release Date: 2010 | |
| | other reviews | sobelecta (4.5)
Album number three doesn't disappoint from the former Blur man.... | TheSmoke (4.5)
Plastic Beach is an very good album that nerver gets boring, it´s dreamy and it´s not compareable ... | Deviant STAFF (4)
Round 3 for Albarn and co. proves that third time is still indeed the charm.... | piero (4)
Maybe Plastic Beach represents the beginning of the end of musical labeling, the start of an embrace... | DhA (4)
Not that different from previous releases, although the lack of a killer single may make this a fans... | Peter Tabakis (4)
Damon Albarn establishes himself as a pop auteur. Pop hits be damned, consistency rules here.... | insomniac15 (3.5)
After two brilliant efforts, Albarn & Co. are back with a bigger number, this time more serious and... | Plutonio (3)
Plastic Beach is another album from hip-hop's eclectic superheroes; this time their eclecticism can ... | clavichordwolf (2)
Plastic Beach is nothing but candy-coated bullshit played for satire.... |
On 156 Lists
|
| Summary: An identity crisis caught on record. |
It's the most normal-sounding Gorillaz album yet in the sense that it's the one that could most easily have been made by anybody else, but the guest-heavy, unfocused Plastic Beach is certainly the weirdest one to listen to. For a band who were so fun and unique on their first couple of records, it's bewildering how they've managed to become something entirely different in spirit without actually changing all that much on the surface.
It all comes down to the massed rank of vocalists here, ultimately. There's no doubting that the most fun thing you can do with this album is put it on, having never heard it before and never looked at the tracklisting, and wait in amazement for the moment you say 'holy crap, is that Bobby Womack?', or 'wow, Kano!, or 'seriously, Snoop Dogg is on this?'. It's the defining feature of the album, but it's also the biggest failing, because it destroys this band's own personal identity.
That doesn't mean that Plastic Beach doesn't sound like a Gorillaz album; far from it, in fact, and that's the real problem. All these songs just sound too much like Gorillaz songs, in an uncomfortable, self-conscious way. Albarn clearly understood that having so many outside influences would confuse things, and so he's made sure that everything has had the once-over to make it sound like a true follow-up to Demon Days. As a result it completely lacks any spontaneity or, really, any fun - for example, there's something far too studied about the cod-exoticism of "White Flag", even though Albarn goes for maximum authenticity points by bringing in the Lebanese National Orchestra, while "Rhinestone Eyes" tries to co-opt Beck's laid-back attitude, but sounds wound-up. The tacky, shamefully '80s sounding basslines and sound effects all over the place (see "Stylo", "Glitter Freeze", "On Melancholy Hill", and "Plastic Beach") are just the nadir of a production job that pitches itself so squarely at 'cool' that you just know it'll sound horribly dated in 3 years.
It rubs off on the guest vocalists, too. Mos Def particularly is disappointing, his performances sounding more New Danger than Ecstatic - it's yet more proof, if it were needed, that he can only ever be truly great over traditional hip-hop and he should probably just stay away from rock and pop altogether. The best thing you could say about Kano is that he sounds comfortable, but his raps lack fire and inspiration, while Lou Reed and Snoop Dogg sound exactly like the washed-up lazy has-beens they are. Gruff Rhys too, to a lesser extent.
Shame, really. This whole project has to go down as a missed opportunity - for the vocalists to properly branch out, for Gorillaz to push on from two very impressive albums, and for Albarn to make any kind of statement at all on climate change (apparently this is a concept album about global warming - who knew?)
|
| Recent reviews by this author | | | |
|
Stumble
Digg
Twitter
Del.icio.us
