Gorillaz - Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez (Review)
Gorillaz - Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez (Review)
10/28/20
As a Gorillaz fan, one may think I was unimaginably excited when I heard word of a brand-new seventeen-track album. While I was certainly excited, it would not have compared to another full-length album, because "Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez" is not an album. If anything, it is a glorified collaboration project that extends to be a pretty hefty length, and could easily throw fans off. This album's marketing with its singles threw it off greatly. Many fans, myself included, thought that Gorillaz would stick with their originally-announced plan of releasing one song every month and having a twelve track compilation to show for it by the end of the year. Naturally, many fans suspected the pandemic had thrown things off, because we did not receive the initial "single per month" quota stated in January. By the end of October, however, we got five extra new tracks added to that initial twelve, in a project with five more tracks added on to seven singles. All in all, this project is confusing. Many have been calling it an album across the internet, but I beg to differ. The track list is spontaneous and arranged almost randomly; if anything, the arrangement is based solely on dynamics. Perhaps this would be a good album to cover in my IGTV "Retracking" series (12 full episodes and one coming later this week can be found at @verysmurt on Instagram). Album or not, this project will be fun to cover and review, and will be an interesting contrast to Gorillaz's past musical outings.
A seventeen-track project was honestly the last thing anyone could expect from Gorillaz. Before this came "Humanz"; their first full-length release in seven years. One year later came "The Now Now"; an album with a much shorter track list and a far smaller list of features. I was pretty thrilled to see that Gorillaz had a new song out, (even if I had no idea what "Song Machine" meant), it was going to be interesting. January was around when I started by current "slowthai" phase, and I was thrilled to see him on such a cool and unique track from Gorillaz. After this, we received "Désolé" featuring an indie French-African woman and a backbeat to die for. The next single was "Aries", which in my opinion, was the best of the bunch when it came out. Afterwards came "How Far?" which is a song that is supposedly not part of the "Song Machine" single series and was added on as a bonus track to the album. Unsure of its initial intentions, it made the deluxe side of this new album, and made for an arguably amazing track despite not featuring Damon Albarn outside of the production. Next came "Friday 13th"; a pretty interesting synth ballad from the likes of up-and-coming English trap artist Octavian. After this was "Pac-Man" which made out to be the most single-like and most quickly popular of the singles thus far; probably due to its prominent and great feature verse and its punchy pop groove. Next came a song meshing Elton John and 6LACK, interestingly enough, and in my eyes, it focused more on Elton John's style and left 6LACK without an opportunity to have a decent verse. All of this is discussed further in an older blogpost from June, which I advise you check out at some point.
That latest track, though, came with a pretty surprising announcement: the first season of Song Machine. It featured seventeen new Gorillaz tracks, (all with their own Instagram posts), and came with at least one new feature per song. It was a wonderful announcement, for sure, but I was still pretty skeptical. More of my thoughts are detailed in a recent blogpost from a few weeks ago, detailing my thoughts on the announcement in a full essay. Grouping the rest of these tracks together, (because there are a fair bit), I'll go over them in two paragraphs. This one will focus more on the core part of the album that didn't include singles, and the following paragraph part focusing on the deluxe side of the album. There's not much to say about the first part of this album, other than the fact that the singles reign supreme. According to the track ranking I put together on my listen to the album before this review, I couldn't place too much very high in this part of the album. My favorite track here is "Chalk Tablet Towers", which still manages to fall as my ninth favorite track overall; not even trumping the entire top half of my ranking. A lot of the tracks in this first main part of the album that aren't the amazing singles fall flat in a lot of areas each. This aside, pretty much all of these tracks are technically and objectively good. One of the areas they thrive the most in is with their uniqueness from each other and other music today. You'll have anything from a trap beat with a strange groove to an indie synth ballad featuring a great R&B verse from Leee John. Despite the fact that said groove is pretty unconvincing and generally iffy, and that R&B track has a lot of dull parts instrumentally and vocally. This aside, most of it remained surprisingly good, just not so much within the context of this album.
After the first eleven tracks, we are handed a pretty surprising yet cool five extra unheard songs in the "deluxe" version. Technically these are still apart of the key project, but I've given up at this point because it's too hard to tell what anything here is supposed to be. Despite my gripes with the non-singles from the first part of this album, this "deluxe" end is actually pretty convincingly good. At first I thought this side of the album was headed in a much more chill and soundscape-like direction. Seeing as we start off with a six minute track with a bunch of random sounds that slowly form an afro-beat groove that was somewhat dicey at first, but became very convincing when the hook eventually kicked in. Overall I tuned out to this track in particular but in a good way. The next track was what I figured was an interlude before I had the "deluxe" context; a very chill and relaxed synth track with nothing much to it that was somewhat short compared to the last song. After this, though, the deluxe end scraps its built up identity, which I was personally in favor of. It shows of perhaps my least favorite track in the album, but I give this song credit because it still managed to be pretty experimental with an interesting groove. Following this, we find a somewhat experimental banger which is undoubtably my favorite song aside from the singles released prior. Then we see a surprisingly great mesh of a K-pop girl group with a JPEGMAFIA verse to hold together a cool groove doused in a synthpop beat. After this finally comes "How Far?", and that closes out the album officially. Overall, I liked the deluxe version a lot, and while it fell short in a few tracks, it still managed to pull a lot of things I wouldn't think worked before this together in cool ways from the perspective of a rapper, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and diehard fan.
Put basically, this album was a very strange venture for Gorillaz. Perhaps Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett were just too excited to mesh their musical and artistic talents once again and put together a new album in only two years. Or maybe it was because Albarn received a shit-load of musical feature license contracts. However it came to be, though, it's still a pretty great album. I've been going over my thoughts far more track-by-track and personalized than I usually do because this whole situation is such a subjective and confusing thing. As much as I'll try to keep defining it in my head, there's only two things I know for sure; it's a piece of music, and it's pretty damn good. My favorite track including the singles is "Aries"; it's just a great indie song that will be under-appreciated no matter how highly it keeps getting praised. My least favorite track is "Severed Head". I found the experimental aspects to be cool in their own respects, but as a track, I feel a lot of it didn't come together as well as the artists may have hoped. Giving this album a 1-10 using half numbers, I give this album a 7.5/10 with a five-word description of: "going down weird in history".
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