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The Man in the Gorillaz Mask
 ON the wall of his recording studio, Damon
Albarn has written "Uncertainty Leaves Room for
Hope" in large black letters. Nearby, the phrase
"Dark Is Good" has one "O" crossed
out, making it "Dark Is God." These messages
loomed directly in front of the mixing board as Mr.
Albarn was working on the second album by his alter ego
Gorillaz, "Demon Days" (Virgin). "I quite
like the idea of covering the walls with the
conversation," he said as he showed a visitor around
the studio. "Then, having transferred that
conversation to something permanent or impermanent, you
just whitewash over it and start the next one."
After a decade as the
leader of Blur, one of England's most celebrated bands of
the 1990's, Mr. Albarn started a new, plural identity, as
Gorillaz. Usually, Gorillaz present themselves as a
two-dimensional band: four cartoon characters drawn by
Jamie Hewlett, who created the punky, unstoppable comic
book and movie heroine Tank Girl. Now and then, however,
Mr. Albarn can be persuaded to drop the mask and admit
that, yes, he is the mastermind of Gorrilaz, an invented
band whose debut album has sold six million copies
worldwide.
"They helped sidestep
the inevitable problem of being an aging art-school
rocker," he said with a chuckle. "They solved
one identity crisis but helped create another one."
Blur helped define the
pomp and swagger - at once nostalgic and defensive - of
Britpop in the 1990's, then turned scruffier and stranger
as Mr. Albarn fell in love with American indie rock. He
was swept into a music-press rivalry with Oasis, as he
watched his Britpop get misinterpreted, he said. He
wanted to recognize a vanishing English culture, not to
tout British chauvinism or turn back the clock. The high
visibility of pop stardom soon lost its charms. "You
get sick of your own voice, you get sick of seeing
yourself on covers of magazines," he said.
"It's just like: 'This is uncivilized. I'm just a
product here. I'm not in control of it and I'm not really
saying anything either.' You turn into, well, a
cartoon."
He also spent time
traveling and soaking up music in Mali, Trinidad, Morocco
and Nigeria, where he has recorded material for Blur's
next album. "Something happened to me which just
made me realize that the whole thing was a con," he
said. "My love of music is much stronger than my
love of my own image. I had to separate the two quite
dramatically. When I went to Africa for the first time, I
got down to playing with musicians and closing my eyes
and listening and just not being worried about people
looking at me. I lost my self-consciousness somewhat. And
now that I've lost it, I really don't want to acquire it
again."
Gorillaz got started when
Mr. Albarn and Mr. Hewlett shared an apartment after each
of them had a longtime romance break up. Mr. Albarn
started knocking together music on drum machines and
analog synthesizers, and Mr. Hewlett devised characters:
the band as an alliance of subcultures. There's
square-jawed, Satan-touting Murdoc on bass; a laconic,
spiky-haired lead singer called 2D; a young Asian girl
named Noodle on guitar and the hefty African-American
Russel on drums. They have adventures in the band's video
clips, and are about to be marketed as toys. Gorillaz
also made a development deal with Dreamworks for a movie
spinoff, but abandoned it after three years.
When Gorillaz toured, Mr.
Albarn and other musicians performed behind a screen
while video projections were shown. After two decades of
music video, no one complained about a concert with an
unseen band. "With something like Daffy Duck you can
feel the soul of the writer behind it sometimes, making
some odd, very strong comment," Mr. Albarn said.
"I suppose that's what I tried to do."
"Demon Days" is
the successor to "Gorillaz," released in 2001.
Mingling rock, reggae and hip-hop in songs with a low-fi
charm, the music on "Demon Days," as on the
previous album, is sparse and shifty. Loose-limbed beats
from cheap drum machines, the blips and swoops of old
synthesizers, distorted guitar and Mr. Albarn's bleary
voice can suddenly make way for orchestral strings, a
gospel choir, or a swerve into a different style. The
album hints at late-1970's reggae and early hip-hop; its
first single, "Feel Good Inc.," harks back to
Rick James's "Superfreak." But where
"Gorillaz," which was recorded before 9/11 and
the war in Iraq, had the spirit of a hazy late-night
party, "Demon Days" merges its casual grooves
with minor-key melancholy. "It's meant to be night
music," Mr. Albarn said. "But it was made
during the day, which I suppose destroys the myth in one
sentence. You don't need to be in the dark to make dark
music. And in fact, if you did you'd probably go
completely mad."
Song titles like
"Kids With Guns," "Last Living Souls"
and "Every Planet We Reach Is Dead" spell out
the album's pessimism. In the song "Demon
Days," the London Gospel Choir sings, "It's so
hard for your soul to survive, you can't even trust the
air you breathe." More than one track is punctuated
by ominous sirens. "All the songs are like episodes
of my worst fears," Mr. Albarn said. "Maybe,
hopefully, I've got them out and they're not going to
come true."
As on
"Gorillaz," there are plenty of guests: the
rappers De La Soul, Booty Brown from the Pharcyde, and MF
Doom along with Ike Turner on keyboards, the singer Shaun
Ryder from Happy Mondays and the actor and director
Dennis Hopper, who narrates a parable about innocence,
greed and retribution set to a droll reggae bounce. That
song leads into a stretch of ethereal vocal harmonies in
a clear homage to the Beach Boys. Mr. Albarn said he
couldn't make the vocal parts sound right until he had a
minor revelation. "If you've ever seen the Beach
Boys in footage, they're all smiling, desperately keeping
the upbeat Beach Boy thing alive, while Brian Wilson is
just absolutely glum as hell. So I did three harmonies
smiling with my face. And then one just being really
miserable, which was Brian. Now it's got that vibe."
"Demon Days" was
produced by Danger Mouse, the alter ego of Brian Burton.
His reputation was made by "The Grey Album,"
which backed up Jay-Z's raps from "The Black
Album" with samples from "The Beatles," or
"the white album." Although he already had a
cartoon name, his musical instincts were his
qualifications.
"I construct and
deconstruct and reconstruct," Danger Mouse said by
telephone from Los Angeles. "We see what you have
and we go as far as you can, and we see what tangents you
can go on, and then you basically take the best part of
all those tangents when you reconstruct. The cartoon
thing is a great concept to enable you to be more
creative, because it doesn't have to fit into the real
world. It just has to fit into what you create."
Mr. Albarn is working with
Danger Mouse on the next Blur album [the
Niger album], and after that, he plans to write music for
London's National Theater, moving completely behind the
scenes. "The further I can retreat the better,"
Mr. Albarn said. "Something happened to me which
made me distrust the cult of the personality in music. I
don't for one second think that realistically I can
completely and utterly become anonymous, because people
like to know who's doing what they're doing. But when you
look in a kind of book of folk music or written music,
and the personality of whoever wrote it comes through in
the music, there's not a picture of them next to it, is
there? There's just the notes. That's the reason for
music."
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