The personnel list of the Gorillaz 2010 Plastic Beach looks like something Timbaland or Danger Mouse would attempt: nearly a front-to-back string of collaborative tracks (even the intro!), with only four the total 16 being credited entirely to Damon Albam and Jamie Hewlett, the group’s creators. On the guest list we have a long list of hip hop artists I’ve never really heard of, the Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music, and for some reason, Snoop Dogg.
The album loosely follows a theme based on the keywords of its title: Plastic Beach. We find many references to tropical paradises, the ocean, and peaceful co-existence, and a few instances of warning against the plastic beach, the falsified, manufactured façade of beauty and dishonesty that has wormed its way into the public’s scorn. Don’t look too deeply for meaning in this, though, because what we have here is an alternative British hip hop / rock album with a liberal Jamaican mindset with about twenty different creative minds sharing the spotlight, and that’s a little too cluttered for any well-defined purpose or message to take root.
What makes up the length of the album is about 70% spacey hip hop, 30% more traditional pallet-cleansing pop music, and the really, really, really weird Sweepstakes. I’ll talk about the hip hop first.
Snoop Dogg’s entry leads the album, and his drawling rhyming style brings you into a properly mellowed state to listen in, and the tracks that follow, all the way up until number six, the groovy and snarky Superfast Jellyfish is one display of competent musicianship after another, with more bass grooves and twinkling vocoded accents than you could ever find a use for. Many of the rappers on this album make the unfortunate mistake of talking about themselves more than they should, which will lead to a few moments of eye-rolling. This won’t be too much of a problem, because it isn’t that difficult to ignore the voice for the skillfully crafted beats for a few measures.
Empire Ants, On Melancholy Hill, and Cloud of Unknowing retain all the shadowy technoy tassels that hang from every single second of the album, but offer a more melodically driven experience which is a welcome break from the frequently experimental atmosphere. Melancholy Hill won me over instantly with its prominent bass, chorus, and extremely tight focus.
Sweepstakes, however, is just weird. Not even the talent of Mos Def is able to make sense of a needlessly complex percussive loop with beep-booping recorders in the background. Beepy sounds are the domain of computers, mister Albam, not woodwinds.
As was the case with the majority of this album, it wasn’t until the third or fourth listening that the songs began to open up, and reveal their inner workings and complexities. What sounds at first as trippy, ambient and confusing will eventually be understood to be a well-made, tight hip hop beat that is accented here and there by a digital orchestra that you won’t see implemented any better until somebody really really studies this and tries to outdo it.
Plastic Beach is a risky chimera of an album: many people working with almost entirely electronic sounds. There is a definite risk of coming off as ingenuine, as studio magic these-guys-have-no-talent negligible. But fortunately that risk was averted. The music is well-crafted, making up for the occasionally wandering lyrical performances. While still largely a hip hop sound, Albam manages to keep enough variation from track to track so that nobody gets bored and nothing gets too repetitive. A successful album, and a wise step forward for the Gorillaz as a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment