GORILLAZ – Stylo
Posted by AlMachine on Thursday, February 4, 2010


Having spent last summer reliving his youth and arguably most influential period as a live performer and recording artist, Damon Albarn has put the Blur re-union back on hiatus and gone back to his cartoon guise as 2D. While there’s no doubt that the first Gorillaz album had a significant impact on the music industry when released during the tepid spring of 2001, its difficult to see where or why anyone would bat an eyelid now.

Sure, ‘Stylo’ isn’t a bad return for the cartoon heroes of Brithop and the three-way vocal talents of Albarn, Bobby Womack and Mos Def at least make for an interesting manage-a-trois, in the most aural of contexts naturally. On the other hand, it doesn’t quite match the mercurial highs of ‘DARE’ or ’19-2000’ either, and at times actually feels like the backing track was written around the same time as their last output, the vocal parts added for posterity at a (much) later date.

Maybe I’m just being a little harsh here, but I guess what me and the rest of the masses are really saying is “Ditch the animation Damon and get back to writing about how rubbish modern life is with your old mucker Coxon.” You know it makes sense. Well I do for starters…

6/10

Dom Gourlay



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