The Fall

My favorite moment on Gorillaz' Demon Days (2005) occurs between 2:00 and 2:10 of "Dirty Harry." The track announces the arrival of Bootie Brown's verse with a crescendoing, gritty shriek-- something between a plummeting helicopter and a cartoon growl. The dramatic entrance is akin to deep jump off a verbal diving board: the momentum carries Brown through an unforgettable verse, buoyed by stop-and-start drum glitches in all the right places. It is rare thing to always look forward to a specific part of a song, and for that five or ten seconds to still not let you down after years of listening. Even though Brown's verse ranges into unforgivably "on the nose" diatribe ("The war is over, so says the speaker / with the flight suit on / Maybe to him I'm just a pawn / so he can advance"), he and the band make up for it with the rollicking, propulsive music.

I guess this is what I had always appreciated about Gorillaz. From song to song, and, in many cases, within a single track, the music tends to announce itself through sudden changes of tone and sound. "Feel Good Inc" maintains a hip hop feel featuring another throwback set of MCs, but it has that nice acoustic interlude with a beautiful Daman Albarn melody. The title track ends a dark and foreboding album with a cinematic uplift. Flash forward to Plastic Beach (2010), and the reverberated voices of Mos Def and Bobbie Womack on "Stylo" precede the futuristic commercial jingle of "Superfast Jellyfish". Later we return to Albarn's gift for melody with "On Melancholy Hill", a gorgeous sing-song dance track. Plastic Beach is not even that good an album. But, still, you can tell that Gorillaz (that is, Albarn) still has that diverse sense of style that keeps an album interesting from front to back.

The Fall, on the other hand, stays static from beginning to end. The effect of the spare drum loops and tidbits of melody is that one wonders if Albarn were intentionally trying to be as minimal as possible. He might explain this decision as valuing the creation of a sparse and subtle mood over complex songcraft. The context that the album was recorded on the road and that each song represents a different city or region of the U.S. even adds to the mood argument. And I'm into that. I like mood. I like Brian Eno. But the mood on this album isn't particularly interesting, and it isn't particularly moody. What's more, I am going out on a limb here and saying that some of these tracks are so not-interesting that parts of them will be used as background fodder for TV commercials within one year from this post-date. They will be "Revolving Doors" (before the melody enters) and "Detroit" (the part with the Moog melody).

The album is being hyped as the first album to be recorded entirely on an iPad. This has apparently given Albarn a good excuse to take a break from making frenetic, far-reaching music. It's funny, because I just got an iPad and this was the first album I happened to listen to on it. I had just started to wonder how the iPad might become a seamless part of my life, considering whether it might be something I used so effortlessly that I forgot it was even there. It could be on while I'm eating breakfast, I might pay attention to it for a minute, then tune it out, depending on whether it crosses my mind as an enjoyable thing to do. The Fall strikes me the same way. It's nice. I like the ambience. It even has another awesome Bobbie Womack track. But I could probably have it on for the length of an entire meal and only notice it a handful of times.