Animated sans animation
By WILL SPITZ | April 10, 2006
There were puppets, singing and dancing middle schoolers, a gospel choir, a 14-piece string section from Juilliard, a who’s who of guests, including Neneh Cherry, De La Soul, Ike Turner, and a lollipop-sucking Shaun Ryder. But no Jamie Hewlett animations?! You’d think that at a major concert event like Gorillaz’s “Demon Days Live” five-night stand at the Apollo in Harlem, any and all technical issues would be ironed out in time for opening night. But before the show two Sundays ago, as the crowd started to get antsy, wondering what the holdup was, Gorillaz’s musical mastermind Damon Albarn took to the stage to apologize to a theaterful of people who had paid $85 each to be there that “some of the visuals” would be absent from the show. (And by “some” he meant “all.”) Pretty wack for a project based on the concept of a “virtual” cartoon band. Judging by Internet chatter, night one was the worst of the lot; after the second show, one blogger even compiled the “Top Five Reasons Why Tonight’s Gorillaz Show Was Better Than Last Night.”
Whatever. After a slow start — the first few songs found Albarn and his 20-piece-plus band shaking off some opening-night jitters and the sound engineers scraping the murk off the mix — things picked up, and by the end we had almost forgotten that we’d sorta been hosed. Highlights included a spirited version of “Dirty Harry” — there’s nothing like a crew of clapping kiddies harmonizing on lines like “I need a gun ’cause all I do is dance” to bring a crowd to its feet. The otherworldly “Don’t Get Lost in Heaven”/“Demon Days” closer was even more goose-pimply live than on the album, Albarn’s falsetto sounding better than his normal voice did all night, especially when contrasted with the muscular harmonies of the Harlem Gospel Choir. The band re-emerged for an encore, the Chinese zither–driven “Hong Kong,” but it felt a bit anticlimactic after Demon Days’ denouement, which was truly stirring, even sans animation.
Related:
Gorillaz in the midst, DARE, Gorillaz | Plastic Beach, More 
- Gorillaz in the midst
Remember the great electronica gold rush of ’97, the year Madonna’s Maverick label won a massive bidding war over long-ignored rave mystic Liam Howlett, a/k/a Prodigy, and we all grooved to the electropunk clash of “Smack My Bitch Up”?
- DARE
Although Gorillaz musical mastermind Damon Albarn is busy recording with the Good, the Bad and the Queen, all’s not quiet on the Gorillaz front, at least not on the commercial front.
- Gorillaz | Plastic Beach
Although this is their first album without an indie-chic producer, the fake band with fake cartoon characters known as Gorillaz stay the course as a very real post-Blur conduit for Damon Albarn's quasi-apocalyptic, '80s-daydreaming, neon-pop habit.
- London falling
Damon Albarn — Blur frontman, Gorillaz supremo, and now millennial minstrel to the drowning city of London — is that eerie modern specimen, the pop star who talks like a critic. The Good, The Bad, and the Queen, "Kingdom of Doom" (streaming video)
- Gorillaz
It’s a butcher’s trashcan of a double-length album.
- Best Music Poll 2006
The results are in for the 18th annual FNX/Phoenix Best Music Poll. Gorillaz, Matisyahu, Dropkick Murphys, Dresden Dolls, and Apollo Sunshine top your charts.
- Cibo Matto
You really can fit all of the hipster downtown NYC-by-way-of-Japan duo’s essential tracks on one disc without leaving anything out.
- Crossword: ''Don't Be a pig''
Translations from the original Latin.
- The Big Hurt: Dr Pepper sickens Axl
Unless we act fast, the darkest chapter in American æsthetic history may soon be revisited.
- Indie gets the blues
White rockers generally come by the blues one of two ways.
- WFNX's top 101 songs of the decade
Video of WFNX's top 101 songs of the decade
- Less
Topics:
Live Reviews
, Entertainment, Hip-Hop and Rap, Music, More
, Entertainment, Hip-Hop and Rap, Music, Classical Music, Gospel Music, Ike Turner, Gorillaz, The Juilliard School, Choral Music, Damon Albarn, Less
