Gorillaz- Plastic Beach (**)

Poor Damon Albarn. He wants so badly for everyone to take him seriously.

It’s the whole reason he started the post-modern, multi-media traffic jam that is Gorillaz. Albarn wasn’t content merely being a footnote in 90s Britpop. He needed a band that didn’t really exist, but one that could put on holographic concerts with songs he’d written. He needed a project that could afford him widespread appeal while dialing into the high art pretention of music critics. He needed to make a statement.

In other words, Damon Albarn wanted to have his cartoon cake and eat it too.

Much like fellow island dweller Paul McCartney (and the pompous art-pop of Wings), Albarn really doesn’t have a great deal to say or explore with his second band. Past the cartoon gimmick and the host of guest stars, Gorillaz's music was always light on substance. This was perhaps forgivable on their eclectic self-titled record, and again on the massive cross over hit Demon Days. After all, Albarn was supposedly blazing trails in new media, in what rock n’ roll and modern music meant, so it was fine to cut him some slack for Gorillaz’s hit-or-miss songwriting.

However on Plastic Beach, the Gorillaz’s third proper album, listeners will find an artist that is throwing everything against the wall in the hopes that something “brilliant” sticks.

Bloated with guest stars and slickened with liberal amounts of studio sheen, Plastic Beach reveals Albarn’s most glaring flaws as a recording artist in a conceptually thin exploration of our supposed plastic culture. The album opens with “important” sounding strings of “Orchestral Intro” as it gives way rather sedated high-hat thump and horn punctuated “Welcome To The World Of The Plastic Beach.” Amidst Snoop Dogg’s sleepy delivery of some revolution that may or may not be televised, “Welcome To The World Of The Plastic Beach” sets the tone for the rather mundane album early on.

It pulls back the curtain to reveal that Albarn is an average beat maker at best.

Overall, Plastic Beach seems firmly stuck in Albarn’s love of late 70s disco and soul, as well as his love for 80s snythpop. Unfortunately, he’s not a gifted enough composer to synthesize it all together in a focused fashion, and his indulgences run wild. The album suffers from Albarn’s lack of editing and his inability to craft consistent beats to maintain the album’s energy. Instead, he gets greedy on cuts such as “Superfast Jellyfish” with its bone-head thump and rolling bass, or “Empire Ants” with its the synthesizer shower and delicately plucked guitar.

While it’s clear that he’s aiming for lush arrangements, Albarn ends up with crowded ones as he crams as many loops and lines as he can into a given track. It all comes across as distracting, as melodies drone into the background rather than being the dense sound collages Albarn wishes they were. Ultimately, all of Albarn’s bells and whistles homogenize the album’s melodies, leaving listeners with the feeling that Plastic Beach’s tracks run indistinguishably into one and other.

Still, Albarn manages to stumble onto some diamonds in the rough, and the few times where Plastic Beach hits, it hits hard. Siren tipped synthesizers, 8-bit keyboard blips, and Albarn’s nasally drawl on “Rhinestone Eyes” make for a definite first half highlight. The half-rapped lyrics of, “When the paralytic dreams that we all seem to keep/Drive on engines till they weep/With future pixels in factories far away…” also keep with the album’s thematic framework, but it doesn't seem so forced here, displaying the earnest potential that Albarn infrequently taps into.

Elsewhere, the mechanized stomp and laser precision synthesizers of “Glitter Freeze” is the sweetest kind of ear candy, all coasting over a throbbing and bubbling bass line. Additionally, Albarn hits a guest star gold mine on the Lou Reed sung “Some Kind Of Nature.” Implementing fluttering keyboards, white noise infused bass, and classic rock swagger, Reed displays deft chemistry with the Gorillaz’s mastermind, a chemistry that feels effortless and unexpectedly organic.

Yet, it’s just a little too late.

The rest of the disc is a scatter shot mix of studio mistakes (The minimalist percussive punch of “Sweepstakes) or innocuous pop that doesn’t go far enough (The drifting tropical haze of “On Melancholy Hill”). Adding insult to injury, Albarn is so lyrically obsessed with this idea of culture that’s meticulously constructed and then consumed (“Yo, pretty packages of frosted delights/Look, it comes with a toy hehe, I like that…”) that he’s unable to see his statement against such artistic fakery embodies it to the T.

Unlike other artists that have co-oped a sound point out it’s artistic shortcomings, Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach tries too hard to emulate what it’s warning against. Instead of effortlessly crafting subversive pop, Albarn has toiled to crack the pop song formula while consciously peppering it with self-aware gobbledygook. At the end of it all, Plastic Beach is sadly void of irony, the one thing that Albarn needed most for his vision to take flight.

What remains is an album that is too half-baked to be taken so seriously.

Still, listeners still have a mediocre-to-average pop album that isn’t nearly abrasive enough to offend anyone. Modern radio stations will probably incorporate few songs from Plastic Beach into their rotation, and the album is certainly capable of functioning as harmless background music. Just don’t tell that to Damon Albarn.

You might hurt his feelings.

Key Cuts: Rhinestone Eyes, Glitter Freeze, Some Kind Of Nature

Sounds Like: The Beatles (The White Album) (The Beatles), Odelay (Beck), Discovery (Daft Punk)

Click on the artwork to sample Plastic Beach for yourself!