Gorillaz In The Mist

The huge line of people waiting to enter the Avalon Ballroom for the first show of Gorillaz’ inaugural tour of America reflected the buzz surrounding this gig by one of the most enigmatic bands to get serious airplay for the past year or two. Stretching most of the way down Lansdowne Street, new arrivals joined the line outside the entrance to Bill’s Bar, a good 50 yards or more from Avalon. As the line shuffled its way towards the door, the thumping sound of the opening set by DJ and founding Gorilla Dan “The Automator” Nakamura throbbed out on to the street. Inside, the crowd was as hip, diverse and giddy as the band’s eponymous debut album: slightly ostentatious, but mostly with a self-deprecating sense of humor. As Nakamura’s set finished, Gorillaz cartoonist (and Tank Girl creator) Jamie Hewlett sipped his beer nervously behind his banks of projectors ranged on a platform at the back of the room. Unlike the first couple of shows in Britain, everyone had a pretty good idea what we were going to get: animated performers and images, projected onto a translucent screen through which, if we were lucky, we might be granted a glimpse of the less two dimensional characters in the show.

A quick summary for those that don’t know, because Gorillaz never entirely took off stateside the way they did in the UK, partly because Americans like their music to fit in a single category in the record store, and have created neverending subgenres to aid the process. Gorillaz, in contrast, straddle genres nearly as cockily as they bestride the Atlantic. Which is no surprise really: the band is the brainchild of, amongst others, the inimitable Damon Albarn. Frontman of the quintessentially British sounding band, Blur, he still managed to strap on some sneakers and make like a New York indie band with “Song 2” (aka the “Woohoo Song”). Together with Nakamura, Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori and Bay-area rapper Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, plus a rotating cast of guests and friends, Albarn brewed up an album that is as seductive and captivating as it is downright weird.

“Clint Eastwood,” the summer-engulfing single set off by Albarn’s slack-jawed “I ain’t happy, I’m feeling glad…” hook, and rounded off by Del’s spiritual-mentor rap is one of those songs. The songs that lodge in the crevices of the brain, and emerge periodically to sun themselves, setting an entire room absently humming, “I’m useless / But not for long…” Yet it might have all gone unnoticed, were it not for Hewlett’s trippy videos and their goofy characters. For, as far as their public image is concerned, those characters from the video are the band: 2-D, the Albarn character with spiky hair and a vacant smile, Russel the grinning, baseball-capped drummer, Noodle the 11 year-old Japanese guitar goddess, and the evil, scowling bassist Murdoc.

Which brings us back to the oddity of the evening’s performance. How does a band connect with an audience with a screen in between them, and animated cartoons as their proxies? The answer seems to be, well, oddly. The audience’s enjoyment of the music was unmistakeable, particularly for the centrepiece “Clint Eastwood,” which Del graced with a different rap than the album version. Yet, despite Del’s exhortations, the audience didn’t exactly rock out, and was even a little hesitant to join in the infinitely crowd-worthy chorus, even when Albarn called repeatedly for the audience to sing along. They were certainly captivated by the bizarre series of images paraded before them, but it lacked a certain immediacy. How do you sing along with someone who you can’t see? Who, according to the band’s mythology, isn’t actually there? Can you have a two-dimensional guitar hero (or heroine, for that matter)? Is 2-D actually as cute as Albarn himself?

There were some wonderful moments. In place of between-song patter, which most bands make a hash of anyway, Hewlett had cartoon vignettes of the Gorillaz band at play. One segment showed 2-D trying to ramp over the somnolent Russel’s belly on a tiny tricycle, and getting thoroughly pounded for his pains. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Nakamura said of the cartoon-character front, “It’s easier to present on the web and on video, but it’s a little more work to present live… Jamie [Hewlett]’s working on it constantly. Technology is what it is, and we have to work within those boundaries.”

The band also struggled with a deficiency of material. There are hardly any weak tracks on the album, but that doesn’t always translate into gripping live renditions, particularly given the contrived nature of the performance. “Sound Check (Gravity)” gloriously united Albarn’s wailing fallen-cherub falsetto and a gritty, turn-table led melody with an eerie, unsettling video. “Tomorrow Comes Today,” the band’s new single, knit together accelerated London cityscape footage to create a background for the band members. Yet in the end, the band reprised both “Clint Eastwood” and “Tomorrow Comes Today,” with slightly different video footage, for their encore, before Hewlett sent us on our way with a final bit of cartoon-video nonsense.

Since the release of their album which included a surprise contribution from Ibrahim Ferrer of Buena Vista Social Club fame on “Que Pasa Contigo,” (“We get in monthly bridge tournaments with him, and we asked him over one time and were like, ‘Would you sing?’ and he was like, ‘No,’ but we won a bunch of money from him, and he was like, ‘Well, I’ll sing,’” says Nakamura), Gorillaz have remained as bizarre and unpredictable as ever. Their new album, G-sides, “a compilation of remixes, a couple of older songs that weren’t on the album,” according to Nakamura, betrays a flare for hip-hop that was only hinted at with Del’s slightly kitschy raps on Gorillaz. Add the fact that Gorillaz recently cut a track with D12 (“911”), and share the lead single off the Blade 2 soundtrack, “Gorillaz On My Mind” with Wu-Tang’s Redman, and Gorillaz are gaining some serious stateside credibility.

Yet the best tracks on G-Sides are still the unpredictable Albarn-influenced tracks, chiefly the zombie-gospel song “Ghost Train,” a weird trip through groovy electronics highlighted by Albarn’s urgent, woozy falsetto. Nakamura says they will be working on “another record sometime next year” if not earlier, depending on how the various band members can continue to balance their other projects from the odd situation of having a side project get larger than anything most of them had ever done before. Certainly there will be more lunacy and oddball vocals. Gorillaz get a lot of criticism for being ostentatiously and deliberately genre-blending, poppy and the first “virtual band.” There once was a time people welcomed innovation from those able to synthesise different ideas into an appealing whole. Love them or leave them, they may well be the sound of the future. “It’s coming on, it’s coming on, it’s coming on, it’s coming on…”