Last year on Christmas Day fans of the world’s favourite cartoon band got a welcome treat. No, Alvin and The Chipmunks didn’t release their second squeakquel on the big screen, but instead the inventive Gorillaz gave their online members their new album, ‘The Fall’, for free. The unique album was recorded on an iPad in just 32 days during the band’s tour of North America in the autumn of 2010 and it now finally gets officially released.
Gorillaz have never been a ones to follow the ‘traditional’ conventions of being a contemporary band so we shouldn’t really be surprised that Damon Albarn’s troop have managed to put together nearly 45 minutes of music on Apple’s space-age gizmo. Although what is very impressive is that ‘The Fall’ was Gorillaz second album in 2010 coming quickly after the critically acclaimed ‘Plastic Beach’.
Where ‘Plastic Beach’ had an abundance of collaborations leading to a plethora of electronic hip-hop singles ‘The Fall’ is stripped bare of glossy production and is pieced together using the finest apps the media tablet has to offer. The album feels like a spontaneous adventure through music and is treated as an on-tour diary or memoir which organically grew while the bus powered down America’s endless freeways with many of the tracks’ titles incorporating the names of the cities they visited such as ‘The Snake in Dallas’, ‘California and The Slipping of The Sun’ and ‘Aspen Forest’ amongst others.
Another of these, the album’s opener, ‘Phoner to Arizona’ creates a great level of expectancy for the next 14 tracks as it uses squelching beats, bleeps and distraught vocals to give an impression of the loading period before a video game kicks into full flight. It also wouldn’t have been out of place on Daft Punk’s soundtrack to the film Tron: Legacy with Gorillaz using an eerie sci-fi sound which is a heavy feature to much of the album. The intro to ‘The Joplin Spider’ almost feels like a homage to Ridley Scott’s Alien with the use of grainy fearful spoken-word recordings creating a strange suspense and sense of impending doom.
Posted on www.virgin.com
Gorillaz have never been a ones to follow the ‘traditional’ conventions of being a contemporary band so we shouldn’t really be surprised that Damon Albarn’s troop have managed to put together nearly 45 minutes of music on Apple’s space-age gizmo. Although what is very impressive is that ‘The Fall’ was Gorillaz second album in 2010 coming quickly after the critically acclaimed ‘Plastic Beach’.
Where ‘Plastic Beach’ had an abundance of collaborations leading to a plethora of electronic hip-hop singles ‘The Fall’ is stripped bare of glossy production and is pieced together using the finest apps the media tablet has to offer. The album feels like a spontaneous adventure through music and is treated as an on-tour diary or memoir which organically grew while the bus powered down America’s endless freeways with many of the tracks’ titles incorporating the names of the cities they visited such as ‘The Snake in Dallas’, ‘California and The Slipping of The Sun’ and ‘Aspen Forest’ amongst others.
Another of these, the album’s opener, ‘Phoner to Arizona’ creates a great level of expectancy for the next 14 tracks as it uses squelching beats, bleeps and distraught vocals to give an impression of the loading period before a video game kicks into full flight. It also wouldn’t have been out of place on Daft Punk’s soundtrack to the film Tron: Legacy with Gorillaz using an eerie sci-fi sound which is a heavy feature to much of the album. The intro to ‘The Joplin Spider’ almost feels like a homage to Ridley Scott’s Alien with the use of grainy fearful spoken-word recordings creating a strange suspense and sense of impending doom.
Posted on www.virgin.com
No comments:
Post a Comment