Gorillaz ft. Daley - 'Doncamatic (All Played Out)'
One of the many things I love about Damon Albarn is that he stands in firm opposition to things, and then promptly does the same sort of thing himself, only the right way. It's too easy to sit back and sneer at the state of modern popular music and congratulate yourself that your tastes are too rarified to be hooked into that ridiculous popularity contest, and to therefore have nothing to do with it. That's basically saying you can't win, so you won't fight.
What's braver is to make your curmudgeonly statements and then get your hands dirty, working on actual new pop songs with fresh talent, in much the same way that the people behind the X Factor do, and the people who encourage raw talent at those schools of performing arts.
To throw yourself open to similar accusations of manufacture - and as we know, Gorillaz are the most manufactured pop group on the planet, if only because the four 'members' of the group don't actually exist on the planet - and come out the other side with songs that sound like current pop music, and a not-rubbish variant of it, to boot, well that's a real feat.
(. It's fishy.)
And now he's shining his special starmaking spotlight on Daley, a luxuriously-bequiffed singer he first discovered while listening to 1Xtra of a morning bringing him in to stretch his delicious tonsils all over a skippy electro skank, based around a stuttery, farty Omnichord, a drum machine and some random squeaks and whooshes. It's named after an ancient Japanese drum machine, y'know.
It's not as attention-seeking as a lot of pop music, but that's really the charm of the thing. What it lacks in explosive self-importance it more than makes up for in cuddly warmth and feline slink.
And this refusenik/combative switcheroo has occurred before, apparently. Damon recently told Zane Lowe - I know, it's a total 91Èȱ¬/Albarn love-in today - that he had never seen the point of iPhones and the like, doesn't tweet, acts the luddite, in essence. And then suddenly, given access to an iPad, he writes most of a new Gorillaz album on it in the same amount of time it would take you or I to write a Facebook status update.
Clearly the man is a coiled snake, waiting for his moment to strike. But when he does, he does it HARD.
Download: 22nd November
91Èȱ¬ Music page
(Fraser McAlpine)
"The generic sounding vocal is balanced by the primitive digital sound of the 8-bit midi-based chord progression."
"Any new Gorillaz material is going to get you excited regardless"
Comment number 1.
At 18th Nov 2010, kutox wrote:Just another superb pop tune from Gorillaz. Not as instant as some of their past hits, but it only takes a few plays.
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Comment number 2.
At 18th Nov 2010, harrythedog10 wrote:Amazing tune, sounds great live too, from Gorillaz and Daley. Hopefully they've learnt from the mistakes of the Stylo promotion campaign and will be giving this song more of a push. Could easily go top 20 if they do thinks right, they're on Live Lounge in a couple of days which is a good sign, the chorus has more pop appeal than anything on Plastic Beach.
4 Stars
P.S: Not to diss Plastic Beach in any way because it's an amazing record.
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