Review Summary: In this, the year 2020, Gorillaz have delivered unto us… a Gorillaz album.
Song Machine is full to the gills with guest artists, who occasionally seem jammed into the same song together with little rhyme or reason. It’s overlong, or at least the deluxe edition is, which for all intents and purposes might as well be the standard version (is there a good reason why that’s a thing we’re still doing in the Spotify era?). It has its fair share of misfires and feels like it’s largely buoyed by a small handful of stellar songs. Yes, it seems that in this, the year 2020, Gorillaz have delivered unto us… a Gorillaz album.
Or, well, have they actually? In many ways, the rollout of the virtual band's seventh full-length feels more akin to that of a compilation or some kind of anthology than to more tightly conceptualized studio outings like
Demon Days or even
Humanz. The steady stream of singles over the past 9 months has given the impression, more than anything, of a series of individual ideas that weren’t necessarily conceived with an eye towards a cohesive album experience. Many of them stood well enough on their own, but how would they hold up in the context of a full-length studio album?
As it turns out, the answer to that question is “fine enough, I guess, but who really cares?” The highlights here still sound great, starting with an incredibly strong 3-song run early in the album. as a fellow product of the late-90s alt-pop scene, Beck is such a natural fit for Gorillaz that it’s a wonder it took Damon Albarn this long to tap him for a guest spot, and he slots perfectly into the cheeky, sunny funk-pop of “Valley of the Pagans”. Imagination frontman Leee John’s smooth falsetto lends a soulful edge to slinky electro-R&B jam “The Lost Chord”. Perhaps most impressively, the toy-keyboard bloops and darkly cartoonish vibe of “Pac-Man” evoke the best of Gorillaz’ 2000s output, complete with a Schoolboy Q feature that feels like the spiritual successor to Bootie Brown’s verse on “Dirty Harry”. From there, we get the synth-pop stunner “Aries”, featuring a Peter Hook bassline that can stand toe-to-toe with anything he did In New Order, and what might just be Albarn’s best hook since “Clint Eastwood”; his plaintive delivery of “And it feels like I’m falling in... again” mines emotional depths we haven’t seen from Gorillaz since at least
Plastic Beach. Lead(?) single “Momentary Bliss” is another highlight, with Slowthai and Slaves providing a rowdy, singalong energy that’s as welcome as it is uncharacteristic for a Gorillaz track.
Of course, this is still Damon Albarn, who can’t make a consistently strong album to save his life, and
Song Machine is not exempt from the requisite failed experiments and bland filler. “Strange Timez” opens the album on a bit of a shaky start, pairing Robert Smith’s unmistakeable warble rather unflatteringly with a stark, spare dance beat. The breezy "Chalk Tower Tablets" is hurt by some cheap-sounding keyboard tones and ugly smudges of autotune around Albarn's vocals (the latter being a recurring issue throughout the album). “Friday the 13th” feels lacking in a proper build or structure, and mostly just leaves Octavian to spin his wheels for four minutes. “Desole”, the second-longest track on the album, doesn’t have quite enough ideas to get it past the five-minute mark and feels rather overextended as a result, despite the tight groove and guest singer Fatoumata Diawara’s impressive performance. Crucially, once it hits the ‘bonus tracks’ section, the album starts dragging pretty badly- None of the final few songs are necessarily awful, but knockout choruses and memorable guest features are in short enough supply that pretty much everything after “Opium” feels extraneous to one degree or another.
At the end of the day, these are criticisms that probably ought to be taken with a grain of salt. In the discussion surrounding
Song Machine’s release, I’ve heard plenty of praise for the songs I’ve been critical of here, and vice versa. Given its sonic diversity and the nature of its rollout, I would be surprised if more than one or two consensus favorites emerge from this album, the way they did from their early albums, and if there’s one thing Gorillaz have never gotten enough credit for, it’s the uncanny ability for their material to grow on you over time. Is
Song Machine the return to form for Gorillaz so many have heralded it as? For better and for worse, I’d say it is.
