Gorillaz The Singles Collection 2001-2011

Happy birthday, Gorillaz; you have been a complete failure. Only by the terms of your original premise, mind you, which promised to be the sort of multimedia, multi-platform, multi-everything project that seemed like a real good idea circa Y2K. The novelty of the core Gorillaz gimmick-- an edgy, anime Banana Splits that gave interviews in character and played high-tech projection live shows in place of their creators, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett-- wore off sometime around the group's third video. But in a surprise upset, Gorillaz have evolved into something more than a cartoon prank or a circus-of-stars side-project, instead becoming the most effective achievement of Albarn's post-Blur career.

Though a singles collection in 2011 is as anachronistic as the DVD-ROMs in the early Gorillaz back catalog, this one makes an excellent case for the substance behind the expired high concept of the "virtual band." The decade covered here marked a mercurial time for Albarn, who celebrated the hiatus of Blur by eagerly shooting off in a dozen different directions. It was almost as though he set out to tick off every clichéd solo career path simultaneously: jamming melodica with musicians in Mali and the Congo, creating a remixer persona, putting together his fantasy-dub supergroup the Good, the Bad & the Queen, and exploring opera and film scoring.

Gorillaz is far and away the most successful of these projects at the cash register, selling millions of records worldwide, headlining Glastonbury and Coachella, and holographically sharing a Grammys stage with Madonna. The group's artistic success has also kept pace with its commercial success, giving Albarn a way to combine most of his musical distractions into an oddly cohesive whole. In retrospect, the key to the project may have been enabling Albarn to abandon the frontman role and become the man behind the curtain, both figuratively and (up until recent live shows) literally. If you don't think that hiding place isn't therapeutic for Albarn, consider that Think Tank, the 2003 Blur album that essentially became an Albarn solo joint, also attempted to blend all of these interests, to less satisfying results.

Taking the greatest-hits route through Gorillaz's career, it's impressive how few of the tracks sound dated. Genre-free zones were all the rage in 2001, with many groups aiming for futuristic blends of hip-hop, electronic, pop, and rock that sounded past their sell-by within a year. But apart from the Deltron 3030 sequel of "Rock the House" and the tacky remixes filling out this collection's runtime, even the earliest Gorillaz singles have avoided the erosion to retro.

Credit an inspirational assist to Hewlett: His music-cliché characters may not have been able to sustain a satire or a storyline, but his trademark post-apocalyptic techno-dread was a suitable environmental muse for the urban Morricone that became the Gorillaz formula. And a surprisingly flexible formula it turned out to be, able to assimilate guest appearances as varied as the artisan-rap of De La Soul, the garble of Shaun Ryder, and the elder croon of Bobby Womack. Off the mic, Albarn found fruitful collaborations with producers-du-jour Dan the Automator and Danger Mouse, borrowing ideas without contaminating the project's core aesthetic.

Behind the protective screen of his invited guests, Albarn used Gorillaz to find a new voice both as a songwriter and a vocalist. There's an unbroken evolutionary line connecting "Tomorrow Comes Today" to "On Melancholy Hill", and it's got an upward slope-- the latter is a moody-pop masterpiece that would sound completely foreign on any Blur LP. The strictly singles format makes this collection an unbalanced summary, with arguably the weakest LP (2005's Demon Days) given the largest representation. But in its synthesis of Albarn's post-Blur interests, it's a fairly accurate snapshot of a busy decade for the singer, where he ironically found mid-life maturity inside a cartoon world.


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