A low-key album of pop, dub and rap experimentation, ‘Gorillaz’ is a compelling but imperfect origin story of one of music’s most enduring bands.
Never originally intended for a conventional album release, Gorillaz’ first Song Machine collection ‘Strange Timez’ is dazzlingly diverse yet emotionally coherent, a perfect soundtrack to a world going wrong outside.
Representing one of the commercial apexes of Britpop in the mid-Nineties, ‘Parklife’ was the realisation of Damon Albarn’s vision for Blur’s music.
Damon Albarn’s reunited supergroup return after nearly 13 years, with a perfectly timed lament for the EU.
An introspective companion piece to last year’s ‘Humanz’, ‘The Now Now’ is a quiet triumph for Damon Albarn and Gorillaz but still comes nowhere near the heights of their glory years.
While it may dwell in ‘Parklife’s shadow in terms of its wider popularity, ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ is the most indispensable album of Blur’s career, and formed a key thematic plank for Britpop.
Gorillaz’ first proper album in seven years, featuring a galaxy of guest stars, effectively re-boots their sound for 2017, though it’s not as distinctive as it once was.
Lauren James and Ed Biggs present their monthly round-up of new album releases, from the biggest rock, indie and pop acts to the best underground albums coming onto our radars, plus a handful of classic LPs from years gone by – click here to listen now! Alternatively, you can subscribe to our podcast by searching for ‘Student Playlist’ or ‘Laser Guided Melodies’ on the iTunes store, or by finding us on PodoMatic! The May
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by Ed Biggs It’s strange to think an album by a fictional band could have such a sizeable impact, but the 2005 album Demon Days by the animated group Gorillaz, the brainchild of Blur singer Damon Albarn and illustrator Jamie Hewlett, helped to shape the direction of pop music today. For all its undoubted creativity, the project’s self-titled 2001 debut ultimately felt a tad sterile, like a laboratory experiment with a
by Ed Biggs The announcement of the first Blur album in over a decade, and the first with Graham Coxon since 1999, was one of the biggest music news stories of the first part of 2015. We’d had the big reunion (two of them), the emotional catharsis, the burying of hatchets, and for many, that would have been enough. But the existence of The Magic Whip seems to have solidified the