FEATURE:
Feel Good Music
Gorillaz’s Demon Days at Twenty
_________
RANKED alongside…
the best albums of the 2000s, Gorillaz’s second studio album, Demon Days, turns twenty on 11th May. Its U.K. release was 23rd May but I am marking its release in Japan. Produced by Gorillaz, Danger Mouse, Jason Cox, and James Dring, it features De La Soul, Neneh Cherry, Martina Topley-Bird, Roots Manuva, MF DOOM, Ike Turner, Bootie Brown of the Pharcyde, Shaun Ryder and Dennis Hopper. I am going to get to some reviews about Demon Days. Reaching number one in the U.K. and several countries around the world, I think perception around the album has changed since its release. In 2005, there was a range of opinions. It is now seen as a classic and iconic. Maybe at the time it was seen as too weird, cartoonish and mad. Its subjects of guns, violence, corruption and greed are scarily relevant now. It is an album that was ahead of its time. In the lead-up to its twentieth anniversary, I am going to end with a couple of reviews for Demon Days. Before then, in 2005, Uncut spoke with Gorillaz’s Noodle and Murdoch:
“Every great band is destroyed by their success: cartoon bands are no exception.” Discuss…
Noodle: When many great bands start off they are uniquely oblivious to what makes them special, what makes that exceptional. When they become successful these reasons are pointed out to them. Their magic is analysed and explained to them by their fans, the press or the people surround them. Therefore it forces a change in them. Either the band
react against it, or try to imitate the elements that make them successful, or other people expect a change. Even the choice to ignore these explanations is a decision. It usually affects that chemistry of a band. It can never remain the same as that first initial unconscious period. Every great band will face destruction or must destroy themselves in order to..start again. Cartoon bands are no exception.
Murdoc: The trouble with great bands is they lose their edge, y’know? The get distracted, or they start writing. ballads, or they mellow out. You know what I’m talking about anyway. As soon as bands become big they invariably need to be brought down. They get complacent. However, cartoon bands are the exception.
Russel: Yeah that’s the difference. You don’t want a cartoon band to become a caricature of themselves.
2D: That would just be weird.
Murdoc: Bands just seem to screw it up at some stage for some reason. If
they don’t, well that’s just equally dull.
Any truth in the rumours that Murdoc wants to kick 2D’s head in for being such an irritatingly good-natured pretty boy?
Murdoc; Hey, I’d want to kick his head in even if he was ugly. You can’t blame it all on good looks.
Was Danger Mouse chosen to produce because of his skills or his name?
Russel: We would never be so flippant with our music as to choose a producer for any other reason than a mutual love and respect for music, and an incredible ability to execute the vision they had for the album.
Murdoc: Yeah. The name Dangermouse was just a bonus.
2D: So was the fact that he turned up with an eyepatch and a mate called Penfold.
Noodle: I was impressed with the work he had done on his own ‘Grey Album’ which I had downloaded from the Internet. It took a while to convince him to work with Gorillaz, but the album took a leap into the incredible when Mr. Mouse arrived. This would be around June 2004. Dangermouse and myself immediately began an intricate pre-production session.
Murdoc: This mainly involved playing table tennis and listening to a load of old electro records.
Noodle: His instinct and insight into music is very intuitive. He will pull out the necessary elements of a track and disguard the rest. In that way the music has an athletic, direct economy whilst still remaining full and rich. I fully expect Dangermouse to produce an impressive run of excellent albums over the next 10 years.
Murdoc: Pass us a biscuit Noodle. I’m getting a bit peckish.
How on earth did Dennis Hopper get involved in this madness?
Murdoc: Oh yeah. Right. Blame it on us. Like Dennis Hopper had spent his entire life in perfectly normal and sane surroundings until he got dragged into the big old nasty madness of the Gorillaz world. Christ! Why don’t you find some other scapegoat, Huh?
Russel: Noodle ran into him at some award show and it turns out he knew some Gorillaz tracks already. We told him what we were working on and then took it from there. He’s always been a symbol for a certain type of expression and free speech that suited the track we were working on. So he seemed a relevant choice for Gorillaz.
Murdoc: He’s always crashed his bike right into the palace of wisdom so we thought, ‘wait a sec I’ll just get my helmet.’
Noodle: The track he narrated was a serious tale or a nation of innocents whose happiness was destroyed by people infiltrating them, and trying to overtake them. As they had never seen aggression or this type of behavior before, they were unprepared. It awoke something in their society which destroyed them and their attackers. This story is read by Dennis Hopper on the album, and because of his history he seemed the right person to deliver it.
2D: Hmmm. And he was great in Speed as well”.
Led by Damon Albarn, I think some took a while to warm to Gorillaz. Perhaps not used to a group like this, it was odd embracing a virtual group. Their most recent album, Cracker Island, was released in 2023. I am going to get to a couple of reviews for Demon Days. NME shared their thoughts about an album that deserved a lot more respect than it got in 2005:
“If you were to invent a pop act right now, where would you begin? Well, human beings take too many drugs and start boo-hooing when they don’t get their own way, so you’d create something, like a cartoon character, to front the whole shebang. You’d do something to make sure The Kids’ parents didn’t understand the appeal – it’s the punk rock way, after all. And since we live in such modern times, you’d promote this new popstar not through the conventional channels, like the gig circuit or CD:UK, but through some semi-interactive platform, to really make the whole thing come alive. You’d pair your popstar with the world’s most can’t-get-out-of-your-headable tune, and once the entire project reached critical mass, you’d whack out a single. Congratulations: you’ve just invented the Crazy Frog. You are, to all intents and purposes, a cunt.
Of course, nobody would suggest that Damon Albarn is a cunt – he was far too pretty in his twenties to ever be truly hateable – but if you need proof of how far we’ve come since the first Gorillaz album dropped four years ago, look no further than how unextraordinary the band’s high concept shenanigans seem now. We don’t think, ‘Hold your horses, cartoon characters can’t make albums’ – we just wonder how Gorillaz sold so many albums in the states when 2D’s teeth were such a state. Gorillaz, now, are no more than a normal band. For this second album the music steps up a gear to compensate for that conceptual shortfall by conjuring a unique mix that’s darker but often more accessible than its predecessor and strutting around very much like the ultimate pop album, but that’s not the only significant development.
Where 2001’s ‘Gorillaz’ began life as an elaborate and self-indulgent vanity project and accidentally turned out to be quite good to the tune of six million copies sold, ‘Demon Days’ is, alongside the Coldplay album, one of 2005’s biggest bankers for EMI. None of this is a happy accident, and nothing has been left to chance. It speaks volumes that legal downloads of the splendid lead single ‘Feel Good Inc’ became chart eligible – thanks to a limited run of vinyl, issued to record shops simply to satisfy chart regulations – in the very week that downloads first qualified in the UK charts. Reckon Damon sat at home and thought of that one? Already, the Gorillaz’ return feels less like a group of mavericks operating in some musical wasteland on the edge of civilisationetcetcetc and more as if every boardroom in the Western world has sprung to life with marketing gurus scribbling ‘MAINSTREAM VS UNDERGROUND’, ‘ASDA BUYERS VS PUNK KIDZ’ on flipcharts. The biggest challenge, given the success of the first album, must undoubtedly have been this: how do you manufacture spontaneity?
They haven’t been short of ideas. Practicality, sadly, has got in the way of the band embarking on a series of gorilla gigs (although you should probably approach your local Dixons window display with caution over the next few months). Instead, a similarly self-conscious culture-jamming exercise was set in motion, through which a viral-type campaign encouraged fans to stick anti-celebrity ‘Reject False Icons’ stickers on billboards. One fan recently noted, in their online diary: “Since it’s so close to the actual release date I plan on going to the mall this week, and writing ‘Reject False Icons’ on some bathroom stalls. Have to do my part, and trust me, I’m not the only one who has done this… I’m part of a ‘team’ who does this kind of thing every day. Pretty exciting actually.”
‘Exciting.’ Make no mistake, this is as sophisticated and insidious as the ‘street teams’ orchestrated for bands like Busted and McFly, except at least that lot get a free frisbee for their troubles. Alongside (but hamfistedly at odds with) the ‘Reject False Icons’ campaign, Gorillaz also launched their ‘Search For A Star’ online campaign, which incorrectly billed itself as the first online-only talent search. Either it was Gorillaz’ intention to eventually tell applicants ‘Look, Michelle McManus isn’t really that bad – what you’ve done is exactly what she did’, or this supposed satire of the fame game was simply in place to have a laugh at the expense of the band’s fans. At the very least, those fans are being used to promote ‘Demon Days’, just like the fans who bought the ‘collectable’ limited edition ‘Feel Good Inc’ vinyl were used to create acres of publicity when the single charted.
Have those fans been cheated? Have we all been cheated? It all becomes irrelevant as soon as you press play, because beyond the mixed messages and startling lack of logic in the album’s promotion, ‘Demon Days’ may end 2005 as one of the year’s most celebrated albums. Before you even consider the sonic and melodic innovation paraded through the album there’s so much crammed into each of these fifteen songs (without any one of them sounding overproduced or cluttered) that repeated listening is a must. With ‘Demon Days’, repeated listening is like throwing a dolphin a fire escape – entertaining the first time, impossible to predict the outcome on each subsequent attempt. There’s always something new to enjoy.
Instrumental in this album’s charm is Dangermouse’s production, which propels the album far beyond the limits of its predecessor; the standard Gorillaz sonic motifs (light-headed dub, left-of-centre electronic flourishes, caricatured wailing from another planet and the irresistible thud of a thousand bass bins) remain, but there’s a seemingly unselfconscious desire from all parties to innovate within the realms of the modern pop song. They succeed at every turn, and the inevitable rolecall of guest stars keep it moving. With the exception of the London Community Gospel Choir, who’d arguably turn up to the recording of an envelope being opened, this is an unexpected and imaginatively-plucked succession of cameos, taking in De La Soul, Martina Topley-Bird, Neneh Cherry (on the droopily spectacular ‘Kids With Guns’), Roots Manuva (on ‘All Alone’, the most ‘Gorillaz’-sounding track on the album), Ike ‘nice guy’ Turner, Dennis Hopper… Even the score from ‘Dawn Of The Dead’ pops in to say a spooky hello at the album’s outset.
We also find Shaun Ryder sounding genuinely relevant for the first time in fifteen years, in an electronic pop masterpiece called ‘DARE’. With the arguable exception of ‘O Green World’ (whose chorus lyric, “Uhhh-uhhhhh-uuhhhhh-uhhhh-uh”, sounds like Jimmy Saville at the dentist), ‘DARE’ is the finest moment on an album which never drops below total brilliance: it’s got more hooks than a New Order bassist lookalike convention and will be absolutely everywhere this summer.
If you believe Gorillaz are genuinely inverting popular culture you probably also think Apple present some ‘cool’ sort of alternative to Microsoft, but while ‘Demon Days’ is as fastidiously packaged and cynically promoted as your average Shania Twain release, it’s an honest overview of the rarely-accepted fact that it never really is all about the music, even when the music’s this extraordinary. ‘Demon Days’ is also just a few IQ points away from being as clever as it thinks it is. Pretty clever”.
It is such a shame that features have not been written about Demon Days. The amazing second studio album by Gorillaz, I do hope that there is some celebration close to the anniversary. Released on 11th May, 2005 in Japan, this is an album I remember at the time and have loved ever since. I am going to end with a review from AllMusic. They made some interesting observations about Demon Days:
“Damon Albarn went to great pains to explain that the first Gorillaz album was a collaboration between him, cartoonist Jamie Hewlett, and producer Dan the Automator, but any sort of pretense to having the virtual pop group seem like a genuine collaborative band was thrown out the window for the group's long-awaited 2005 sequel, Demon Days. Hewlett still provides new animation for Gorillaz -- although the proposed feature-length film has long disappeared -- but Dan the Automator is gone, leaving Albarn as the unquestioned leader of the group. This isn't quite similar to Blur, a genuine band that faltered after Graham Coxon decided he had enough, leaving Damon behind to construct the muddled Think Tank largely on his own. No, Gorillaz were always designed as a collective, featuring many contributors and producers, all shepherded by Albarn, the songwriter, mastermind, and ringleader. Hiding behind Hewlett's excellent cartoons gave Albarn the freedom to indulge himself, but it also gave him focus since it tied him to a specific concept. Throughout his career, Albarn always was at his best when writing in character -- to the extent that anytime he wrote confessionals in Blur, they sounded stagy -- and Gorillaz not only gave him an ideal platform, it liberated him, giving him the opportunity to try things he couldn't within the increasingly dour confines of Blur. It wasn't just that the cartoon concept made for light music -- on the first Gorillaz album, Damon sounded as if he were having fun for the first time since Parklife. But 2005 is a much different year than 2001, and if Gorillaz exuded the heady, optimistic, future-forward vibes of the turn of the millennium, Demon Days is as theatrically foreboding as its title, one of the few pop records made since 9/11 that captures the eerie unease of living in the 21st century. Not really a cartoony feel, in other words, but Gorillaz indulged in doom and gloom from their very first single, "Clint Eastwood," so this is not unfamiliar territory, nor is it all that dissimilar from the turgid moodiness of Blur's 2003 Think Tank. But where Albarn seemed simultaneously constrained and adrift on that last Blur album -- attempting to create indie rock, yet unsure how since messiness contradicts his tightly wound artistic impulses -- he's assured and masterful on Demon Days, regaining his flair for grand gestures that served him so well at the height of Britpop, yet tempering his tendency to overreach by keeping the music lean and evocative through his enlistment of electronica maverick Danger Mouse as producer.
Demon Days is unified and purposeful in a way Albarn's music hasn't been since The Great Escape, possessing a cinematic scope and a narrative flow, as the curtain unveils to the ominous, morose "Last Living Souls" and then twists and winds through valleys, detours, and wrong paths -- some light, some teeming with dread -- before ending up at the haltingly hopeful title track. Along the way, cameos float in and out of the slipstream and Albarn relies on several familiar tricks: the Specials are a touchstone, brooding minor key melodies haunt the album, there are some singalong refrains, while a celebrity recites a lyric (this time, it's Dennis Hopper). Instead of sounding like musical crutches, this sounds like an artist who knows his strengths and uses them as an anchor so he can go off and explore new worlds. Chief among the strengths that Albarn relies upon is his ability to find collaborators who can articulate his ideas clearly and vividly. Danger Mouse, whose Grey Album mash-up of the Beatles and Jay-Z was an underground sensation in 2004, gives this music an elasticity and creeping darkness than infects even such purportedly lighthearted moments as "Feel Good Inc." It's a sense of menace that's reminiscent of prime Happy Mondays, so it shouldn't be a surprise that one of the highlights of Demon Days is Shaun Ryder's cameo on the tight, deceptively catchy "Dare." Over a tightly wound four minutes, "Dare" exploits Ryder's iconic Mancunian thug persona within territory that belongs to the Gorillaz -- its percolating beat not too far removed from "19/2000" -- and that's what makes it a perfect distillation of Demon Days: by letting other musicians take center stage and by sharing credit with Danger Mouse, Damon Albarn has created an allegedly anonymous platform whose genius ultimately and quite clearly belongs to him alone. All the themes and ideas on this album have antecedents in his previous work, but surrounded by new collaborators, he's able to present them in a fresh, exciting way. And he has created a monster album here -- not just in its size, but in its Frankenstein construction. It not only eclipses the first Gorillaz album, which in itself was a terrific record, but stands alongside the best Blur albums, providing a tonal touchstone for this decade the way Parklife did for the '90s. While it won't launch a phenomenon the way that 1994 classic did -- Albarn is too much a veteran artist for that and the music is too dark and weird -- Demon Days is still one hell of a comeback for Damon Albarn, who seemed perilously close to forever disappearing into his own ego”.
I am going to finish there. A remarkable album with some incredible collaborators and standout cuts. I am not sure whether there is a special anniversary reissue coming along. Demon Days deserves it. An album that is now seen as influential and important, that wasn’t the general feeling in 2005. In my opinion, Gorillaz’s second studio album is a…
REMARKABLE work.