“Strange News from Another Star” envelops listeners in the chill of a winter’s night spent looking off-world. So this was supposed to be their American album? The most delightful song, “On Your Own,” blurps and wheezes as if Eno were turning the knobs in 1972, long ago and far away. The “Sexy Sadie” harmonies and chord sequence in the last minute of “Beetlebum,” laden with EFX, is a delight, despite what Tom Ewing correctly identifies as a listless Albarn performance I’ve no idea what a “beetlebum” is, but when in doubt say, “It’s about heroin.” As decent as they were cranking out fake punk tunes - “punk” does not equal “fast” - they were better when they evinced curiosity about other musics, like the dub-influenced organ-drenched crawl called “Death of a Party,” in which Albarn plays listless instead of singing listlessly. ![]() The album where they dropped the sour jokes and put underused Graham Coxon at the front where he belongs. Their pop sense remains intact even when Coxon mewls through his parts of “Coffee and TV.” I listened to Thirteen that summer of 1999 as the pus drained out of the wound of an unrequited love affair, leaving me with an awful reckoning. “Bugman” and “Trim Trab” offer equally bad trips. “Gotta get over,” Damon Albarn mumbles in “Caramel,” like a convert to New Age, as Graham Coxon lets guitar EFX accumulate. It works because the band’s commitment to studio-as-instrument is total and impressive. ![]() This kiddie mash-up of Phil Manzanera solo albums, Wire, British soul, and the band’s still robust affection for Ameri-indie served a collection about dashed hopes. Amazing how Gorillaz still get my students hopped up, enough to disinter the old joke about the other band Wings singer-bassist Paul McCartney was in (I wasn’t even aware it took Kendrick Lamar to stop 2017’s Humanz from debuting US #1).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |