"Song Machine" by Gorillaz: A (Very Late) Announcement Discussion
Let's Discuss Gorillaz's "Song Machine" Album
10/13/20
Somewhat recently, the notoriously virtual band of English humanoid monkeys called "Gorillaz" announced their latest project. It's hard to give this a certain name, (like an album or mixtape), because nobody is really sure what this is. Personally, I thought it was going to be more like what I heard that Gorillaz planned to do before. This plan was that Damon Albarn (the mastermind of Gorillaz's music, in a sense) was planning to release one new song each month of 2020. Each song would add up to twelve songs by the end of the year exceeding 25 minutes making it technically the length of an album, though without the songs having much if any correlation. This seemed like a pretty confusing and sketchy idea at the time, but I did not want to wait another seven years for the next Gorillaz album after "The Now Now". Overall, it was a strange idea that I honestly didn't like much at first, but if slowthai wasn't the vocal backbone of the first track, I would have been much less accepting.
Throughout the next few months, they produced more and more singles. By this point, the definition of what the album was became more clear; every song included at least one vocal feature, making this somewhat of a collaboration project. A few people I've talked to about this series said that sometimes the collaborations could get a bit out of hand. Like in the case of Skepta rapping the entirety of "How Far?" with Gorillaz only producing it with no vocal appearances from anyone. The vocals became a little more structured after this, and granted, this wasn't technically an episode, but rather a tribute to the death of legendary Nigerian drummer Tony Allen. The singles were planned to come out far more frequent than they were at this point, but with the coronavirus delaying production of primarily the music videos, there were many delays. At the end of the "PAC-MAN" music video, Gorillaz announced that "Song Machine" would be coming back in September. I assumed this must have meant that they would be back with another season of the project at the end of September, while I felt that only five episodes and six songs was still cutting it a little short.
To my personal surprise, Gorillaz came back in very early September with a whole new song called "Strange Timez" with Robert Smith. This was a great song, no doubt, but my feelings were a little conflicted on it compared to the wondrous works we've seen in this series so far. Though, we did get a hefty amount of amazing news to compensate for the slight problems with this song. We received word of ten completely new songs set to be compiled into an album released on October 23rd. I saw them in separate Instagram posts, and each caption held the title and featured artist, artists, or groups. It was an amazing sight that I personally went crazy for. After this, neither I nor probably a lot of the internet expected them to drop any more singles from this project before its quickly-coming release. Though, as of October 13th, they've released one more song featuring a strange mash-up of Elton John and 6LACK called "The Pink Phantom".
As of now, my expectations for this album currently are somewhat low. This latest track never struck me as anything truly great. Elton John wasn't too bad at all, and 2D's lyrics were some of the best songwriting from this series to date. Though, Elton's voice did sound a little strange here for some odd reason. This may have been due to the electronic, dark, and slightly experimental vibe of the song that could only really compliment the voices of a few singers. Elton's grand and ear-grabbing performance somehow didn't work very well here. Surprisingly, 6LACK wasn't very good either; though, in hindsight, sticking a heavily auto-tuned rapper over a grand and depressing five-minute piano ballad was a strange choice that may not have worked for the better in this case. As previously stated, my expectations for this album have been low. Though, what I didn't mention is that they are only low now compared to most of the tracks from the series so far and how high said tracks have set the bar. Overall, my hopes for this album are very high, and despite the recent tracks, my expectations are still higher than I made it seem. I am very excited for this album, and will definitely post a full-length review by the end of this month.
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