Damon Albarn’s outfit lace bubbling synths with lonely lyrics, while bands from Shame to Algiers pulse with post-punk energy
Gorillaz, Cracker Island ★★★★☆I think the sadness has come again,” a weary voice croons, threading a minor-chord melody through the glitterball disco of Tarantula. “Time’s run out, nowhere’s real,” croaks our depressed hero. The band charges on with a fizzy élan that suggests the opposite.
“Sad bangers” are a reliable staple of pop, but something deeper underpins Gorillaz’ eighth album, Cracker Island. Amid plush synths, bubbling bass and up-tempo beats emerge notes of loss, loneliness and a sense of disillusion with a “cracked screen world” (Tired Influencer), where “the truth is Auto-Tuned” (title track), and our hero scrolls through “the infinite pages” in search of a tangible connection (Silent Running). If it didn’t seem so outlandish, I might think that Gorillaz were in the grip of a midlife crisis.
But can cartoons grow old? Damon Albarn is 54 and has been inhabiting his alter ego 2-D for 22 years. Conceived with British comic-strip artist Jamie Hewlett, the character is depicted as a perpetually blank-eyed, empty-headed, innocent frontman of a quartet of animated misfits – a group who have facilitated the most extraordinary second act in pop history. Launched in 2001, Gorillaz provided a dazzling vehicle for Albarn’s formidable talents, allowing him to create contemporary pop free from association with his band of Britpop rockers, Blur, and untainted by pop culture’s obsession with youth.
Blur are reuniting for a short series of stadium concerts this summer, reflecting their status as a revered heritage act. Yet Gorillaz have, in fact, now released as many albums as Blur, and are arguably better known around the world, with six Top 20 albums in the USA and billions of plays on streaming services. A big part of their success is tied to their elasticity, particularly Albarn’s enthusiasm for collaborating with a huge range of other artists, extending Gorillaz’ reach across the musical spectrum. There were over 20 different guest stars on their ebulliently playful previous album, Song Machine, in 2020.
By contrast, Cracker Island only features a handful of (mainly discreet) guests, albeit of the calibre of Stevie Nicks lending her deliciously cracked tones to the harmonies of Oil, and Latin American superstar Bad Bunny providing a foil to Albarn’s melancholy amid the summery rhythms of Tormenta. Albarn’s principal collaborator here is US super-producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Pink, Paul McCartney), who, at 53, is of the same generation as the Blur man. Was this an experiment in creating chart pop that suits their advancing years? Strip away the fantastical imagery constructed around themes of a sinister cult, and what remains is a sleek album of plush, contemporary bangers, rich with melody and bright in sonic colours, but emotionally dislocated from the superficial milieu it inhabits.
In a sense, perhaps, not much has changed. Back in 1993, the youthful Blur caught the nation’s mood with the Britpop classic Modern Life is Rubbish. Thirty years on, Albarn sounds just as dissatisfied with the state of the modern world, yet he still appears to have at least a cartoon finger on its pulse. Neil McCormick
Adam Lambert: High Drama ★★★★☆With his big hair and bigger eyeliner, the theatrical spectacle of Adam Lambert’s presence is “larger than life”, as Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out for a Hero puts it. That song is the opener on Indiana-born, California-raised Lambert’s new cover album, which casts stardust across re-imagined versions of country ballads, ’80s New Romantic cuts, ’90s indie rock, and more recent pop hits.
At 41, Getting Older (Billie Eilish) is delivered with a wink and a nod to an industry that wants unwrinkled flesh on its magazine and album covers. The ghostly ballad Ordinary World (Duran Duran) lays weeping violins over a sorrowful, echoing piano melody, as Lambert delivers restrained assurance in the line, “I won’t cry for yesterday… I will learn to survive”. His echoing harmonies spiral upwards into heavenly falsetto atop wailing hair-metal guitar – pure Freddie Mercury. If anyone can nail it, it’s Lambert, who has toured alongside Queen as lead vocalist since 2011.
Lambert is also attuned to cover songs, having served, since 2009, both as a reality TV contestant and judge in America and Britain, so it’s unsurprising that he transforms fellow songwriters’ lyrics and music into button-bursting pop worthy of a stadium. Did we need a funky bassline and a staccato-style, breathy vocal on Kings of Leon’s Sex on Fire? Arguably not, but the folky, brassy guitar of Pink’s My Attic is a genuine tearjerker, revelling in melancholy memories, and the sultry crooner I’m A Man (Jobriath) channels Fast Love-era George Michael in all the right ways.
In Lambert’s versatile delivery, his influences bubble up like champagne: Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston and Mercury (of course). Come for the drama, but stay and swoon for Lambert’s intoxicating, heartfelt closer: Dinah Washington’s Mad About the Boy. Cat Woods
Food for Worms is the third album from the alt-rock band Shame
Credit: Handout
Shame: Food for Worms ★★★★☆The rowdy alt-rock quintet Shame were barely out of school uniform in 2016 when they started out in suburban south-west London. They soon fell in with a new generation of bands including Squid, Black Midi and Black Country, New Road, who, for all their aesthetic differences, shared one core value – a staunch disavowal of trite pop in favour of structural complexity and lashings of discordant noise.
Around an initial pair of long-players which were, in all honesty, hard work to listen to, Shame have toured the world, and everything has finally now fallen into place with this third outing, which their garrulous frontman, Charlie Steen, not implausibly describes as “the Lamborghini of Shame records”.
One might almost call it their answer to The Clash’s London Calling, as they step back from the initial roar of excitement which (against all odds) took 2021’s Drunk Tank Pink album into the Top 10, and allow more light and shade into their sound with clear crowd-pleasing intent. The clanging guitars on the opener, Fingers of Steel, soon lead to an infectious technique whereby a yobbo choir repeats some of Steen’s choicest putdowns of a moaning acquaintance, and Six-Pack follows up with a breath-taking wah-wah riff to drive lyrical imaginings of total wish-fulfilment.
Where, in the past, Shame shared the hectoring-and-bludgeoning approach of Bristol’s Idles, here the artful twanging harks back to ’90s alt-heroes Pavement, with more swing, dynamics and moments of exhilarating release. For Adderall’s emotive words about a prescription drug-addicted pal, Steen modifies his declamatory bark to a croon, and he properly sings on the acoustic-textured Orchid. It isn’t without harrowing moments (see The Fall of Paul), but Food for Worms is all the more exciting for its contrasts in brutality and beauty. It’s challenging, consummately constructed, and thrilling throughout. Andrew Perry
Bria Salmena: C-ntry Covers Vol 2 ★★★★☆Bria Salmena’s second volume of covers exists at the juncture where lovelorn, gothic Americana meets lo-fi synth-pop. Salmena partnered last year with multi-instrumentalist Duncan Hay Jennings, her long-time collaborator in both the indie-rock band Frigs and the backing band for the masked Americana rebel Orville Peck. It was during a break from recording with Peck, soon after Salmena’s American tour with Wolf Alice, that the duo set up in their tiny Toronto home-studio, with a group of local musicians, gathering in the mid-winter to reimagine the sounds and sentiments of a classic Americana repertoire.
The first volume of covers, released last year, was a more spacious, cinematic affair, owing to the rural Canadian landscape where it was recorded. Volume 2 feels more insular in its succinct offer of six songs, simultaneously romantic and doleful. The mournful, smoky By The Time I Get to Phoenix was made famous by Glen Campbell, before Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds translated it into baroque, bluesy gloom-rock. It’s this version that Salmena sculpts to her own wiles.
The sweet, sparse, banjo-twanging folk of Gillian Welch’s devastating I Dream a Highway becomes even more dark and dreamy in Salmena’s interpretation. Welch’s original, a lullaby to the ageing Memphis-bound protagonist who laments their golden years, is a coming-to-peace with, or at least a crumbling resistance to, the inevitable passing of youthful naïveté.
When Salmena throws herself into despair and gloom, saxophone, banjo, guitar and all, and largely respects the original influence, it’s pure heartbreak. The synth-pop interpretation of a Paula Cole classic, on the other hand, is superfluous, even if it still has charm. This is a road-trip soundtrack for the twilight hours. CW
The post-punk band Algiers, who release their album Shook today
Credit: Ebru Yildiz
Algiers: Shook ★★★★☆After ten years in action, Algiers conjure a bewilderingly hard-hitting fusion of post-punk, funk, jazz, hip hop and experimental noise, which they’ve latterly developed in their adopted home city of Atlanta, Georgia – one of the most culturally rich, if chaotic, cities in the American South.
The free-form project was initially kickstarted in London, however, with co-founding drummer Matt Tong an ex-member of British rockers Bloc Party, and Portishead’s Adrian Utley a sometime producer. They’ve toured supporting Depeche Mode, and collaborated with Massive Attack, but perhaps reached their high point (thus far) with 2020’s Can The Sub_Bass Speak?, an explosive track (and one much viewed online) on which vocalist Franklin James Fisher unflinchingly exorcised the pervasive racial tensions in Atlanta and beyond.
With this fourth album, the collective define themselves as “a conduit for a multiplicity of voices”, and, as a succession of singers, rappers and ‘found’ vocalists vie for air-space, it can feel as though the whole of America were talking at you across an often uncomfortable 55 minutes. These range from the robotic announcer at Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport, on the minimal beatbox overture Everybody Shatter, right through to Rage Against The Machine star Zac de la Rocha, who chips in with some rap fury on the stutteringly angry Irreversible Damage.
For uninitiates, Shook’s sensory onslaught may resemble Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, updated for the post-Trump era. Once you get past the intentionally challenging mood of urgency, however, there are many excellent moments, including Cleanse Your Guilt Here’s looped-up Wu-Tang Clan-style groove, the jungle-speed breakbeat funk of 73%, and A Good Man, whose inspired collision of high-velocity rapping, punk riffing and Appalachian violin pips Ice-T’s Body Count for potency.
At the very least, Algiers present a welcome antidote to mainstream rap’s craven materialism. Brimming with both spiritual depth and astonishing musical dexterity, Shook feels contemporary and important, reflecting America’s present-day diversity and letting the disenfranchised speak.
