Tag Archives: plastic beach

#1316: Gorillaz ft. De La Soul & Gruff Rhys – Superfast Jellyfish

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On Thursday 25th February 2010, Zane Lowe premiered ‘Superfast Jellyfish’ on BBC Radio 1 when he was still hosting a show on that station. The second song unveiled from Gorillaz’s then upcoming third album, Plastic Beach. I didn’t catch that premiere. In fact, I’m quite stumped on when I heard the song the first time. I want to say it was another ‘Stylo’ situation where I was watching Soccer AM, might have even been the Saturday after that premiere, and during a goal montage the song played. But it also may have been another case where the song was uploaded on YouTube, and I caught the song on there. My gut’s saying it’s the former, but I really can’t remember. I do know for sure that I downloaded Plastic Beach on 7th March, the ol’ family computer says so. Gorillaz had come through with another banger of an album, and ‘Superfast…’ has always been one of the most enjoyable cuts on there.

In keeping with the whole environmental theme of the LP, ‘Superfast Jellyfish’ predicts a future where we’ll all be eating jellyfish as a commodity, as a result of depleting the ocean of all its natural wildlife for our own gain. In the Gorillaz-Plastic Beach world, the superfast jellyfish are an actual animal that swim around the island depicted on the album’s cover. The track, in general, is something of a commercial for the delicacy. Plugs 1 and 2 of De La Soul provide the voiceovers similar to those you’d hear in those fast food adverts, and there’s a sample of an actual TV dinner commercial to ram the message home. And Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals comes in for the glorious choruses, which further promote this way of eating while also alerting us on the continuous pollution of the sea in the process. Another fine, fine blend of rap and singalong melody as only Damon Albarn and his guests know how do when creating a Gorillaz composition.

And we have a whole making of documentary that shows the work that went into it. Not just a song, but the whole album. What I’ve linked to is, appropriately, the ‘Superfast Jellyfish’ section of the doc. Looks like Albarn, Rhys and De La Soul all had fun while in the studio. You like to see it. I do remember wondering if Rhys was on the song at all on those first listens. I thought it was Albarn doing all the vocals initially in the choruses. It might have taken watching that documentary years back to convince me it actually was Gruff Rhys. And I also have this vivid memory of waiting in line for a ride at Thorpe Park on a school outing, only a few months after the album was out, and this kid in front of us started reciting the lyrics to the song’s first verse. Maybe to impress his mates he was with, I don’t know. It took all the energy within me to refrain from being like, “Hey! Superfast Jellyfish! I know it too!” It was for the good that I did. But I knew what was up.

#1301: Gorillaz ft. Bobby Womack & Mos Def – Stylo

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If there was a lot of talk during the later months of 2009 that a new Gorillaz album was coming out soon, I had somehow missed out on all of it. At that time, I was 14, my sister had gone to university for her first year and my mum would usually be at work for some hours of the day during her shift. So I suddenly found myself having a lot of freedom at the house. And I spent that freedom watching more TV and spending more time playing video games. During the times when I was watching more television, the programme Soccer AM was on. That was a sport-comedy show that had guests and skits and focused on the great sport of football for two hours. Got cancelled a couple years ago. But it was during a “best goals in League [number I can’t recall]” montage on there that ‘Stylo’ played in the background, and I found out that Gorillaz had a new single and a new album coming soon after five years of waiting.

That album turned out to be Plastic Beach. I was gonna say, “We all know how I feel about this album.” It’s much more likely you all don’t know. It’s probably my favourite one by Damon Albarn and co. In my opinion, still the last great, great one they’ve done. Even though it was the first single, ‘Stylo’ has never reached the sort of popularity that their previous first singles received almost instantly. ‘On Melancholy Hill’ seems to be the number that did instead. But I’d be in ‘Stylo”s corner if time came that I had to defend it. Like some of the greatest Gorillaz tunes, the song relies on an unexpected collaboration of artists. The blend of hip-hop artist formerly known as Mos Def and legendary soul-man Bobby Womack is one that shouldn’t work on paper. But with Albarn tying it all together, it somehow does. How could you hold any negative feeling about the way Bobby Womack explodes into the track (“IF IT’S LOOOOVE, it’s electric”) or how Albarn delivers his soft, melodically ascending vocal? With Mos Def bookending it all with his verses as well? It’s a fine concoction.

All three artists respectively sing about completely different things, though mentions of ‘love’ and ‘electricity’ aid in threading their lyrical sections together. What the song’s about, I couldn’t tell you, but I’m sure it ties in with the whole anti-pollution/overpopulation themes the whole album was built around. The official music video for the song, featuring Bruce Willis of all people, wasn’t released until September 2010. That was eight months after the single’s initial release. I’d like to think that had the visuals been initially released alongside the song, it could have done so much better commercially. The song didn’t even chart over here in the UK, being only available to download digitally. It opens up a can of worms about that whole Plastic Beach era of the band. This fanmade documentary explains the time very well. It’s just the way things have to go sometimes. But despite all that, the music’s always been damn good. And ‘Stylo’ is a mark of that quality.

#1239: Gorillaz ft. Lou Reed – Some Kind of Nature

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Plastic Beach, Plastic Beach. In my eyes, still the last really great Gorillaz album. It’ll be 15 years old in just under two weeks. I guess it does feel that way. But I can also remember downloading the album a few days before it was officially released in the UK and listening through the whole thing like it was last week. Wikipedia says that it was released internationally on the 3rd March 2010, but that’s wrong because albums were released on Mondays and that date was a Wednesday. I “got” it on the 5th, the album was released in the UK on the 8th. Though I guess the Wikipedia date was when it was released in Japan or something. That place usually got the early release dates, the lucky people. But that explains why it was so easy to find a high-quality version of it online so I could nab it for myself.

‘Some Kind of Nature’ is the ninth song on the album. There’s a range of guest features on the LP to say the least, and ‘Nature’ wasn’t left out in this regard as alongside Damon Albarn on vocals appeared Velvet Underground man and general top singer-songwriter person Lou Reed. He provides some additional guitar as well. Albarn tells the story about working with Reed in this little video here. You might as well watch the whole thing if you’re a fan. But the meat of it is, Albarn sent Reed three songs to work on. Reed rejected them all. On the fourth attempt, Reed accepted with a vague idea. Albarn flew to New York to meet, but then Reed left the studio to go somewhere else and wrote all his thoughts about plastic in a taxi. He came back, showed Albarn his work, did the vocals in one take. And what you hear was the result. But it’s better to hear the person who experienced it actually tell the story, so go ahead and click on that link.

I can’t remember whether this one was an instant like on that first hearing. But just a week or so after I downloaded the album, ‘Some Kind…’ got its own little music video which I guess let me become accustomed to the song very quickly. The whole track runs at a very chill tempo, led by Reed’s very straight, robotic-like vocals which make a great contrast for Albarn’s richer, melodic voice when he comes in later. I also like singing along to the synth that arrives around 25 seconds in. Makes for a good melodic centrepoint underneath Reed’s recited delivery. The lyrics you’ll find online vary from place to place, but whichever site has the line “All we are is stars” as the last line of the chorus is the correct one. It doesn’t make grammatical sense, but then again, a lot of songs don’t. Only got two more songs left to write about from Plastic Beach, and they both begin with ‘S’. So they’ll be coming around relatively soon. Any guesses as to what they are can be left in the comments.

#1047: Gorillaz ft. Mick Jones & Paul Simonon – Plastic Beach

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Well, it was only a few days ago that I was writing about another song from Plastic Beach, so I won’t go ahead and give the whole spiel on thoughts and feelings on it. Might as well just redirect you to that very post though, only if you were grossly interested in this guy’s first encounter with the album. I want to say that the title track was one of my favourites from the very beginning. I clearly remember going on YouTube, finding ‘Plastic Beach’ – the song – online and pleading with people to see if they could hear the falsetto vocal that Damon Albarn carries on into the choruses after singing ‘It doesn’t know’. No one could come up with the answer I wanted, so whatever he is singing is still a mystery to me to this day. In fact, I think there are a lot of lyrics in here that lyrics sites don’t have down correctly, no matter how official or reliable they claim to be.

Without hearing any of the music and just looking at the tracklist, seeing the features, it was always going to be interesting to see how former Clash members Mick Jones and Paul Simonon would be involved on this specific track. They’d both taken lead vocals in the past on Clash songs. Very notable, famous ones too. But once that introduction starts, you can tell it’s Jones on that guitar and Simonon on the bass straight away. That whole introduction, so atmospheric and scene-building by the way, sounds like an instrumental Clash outtake, but with some synthesizers over the top. Very cool to see the two performing their take in the studio in the Plastic Beach documentary too. The introduction lasts for 40 seconds or so, giving way to the rest of the song is predominantly led by keyboards, synthesizers and the like, with an immediate groove and head-bopping rhythm, over which Albarn sings about about living on the plastic island depicted on the album’s ominous front cover. A picture that isn’t computer-generated, by the way. That’s an actual large-scale model that a crew took pictures of. Pretty cool to know.

If it wasn’t for that Jones/Simonon introduction, ‘Plastic Beach’ would follow a very simple structure I’ve come to realise. Without it is your standard track of a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus/end, which you can find just about anywhere. Have a feeling Albarn wanted to spice things up a bit, and so recruited some help to make things a bit more interesting. But even then, the song hits the spot in so many ways. Albarn harmonises with himself, singing in quite the relaxed tone for the verses and too in the choruses, also changing the pitch of his vocals to achieve a harmonising effect. The high-pitched ‘Plastico, plastico’ vocals that come in before the final chorus I’ve come to not like as much. They feel a bit filler-y, just to add something in before things are rounded off. But they’re not enough to completely steer me away from the song. A shame that the lyrics aren’t completely valid wherever you look though. I actually uploaded these ones back around its release, taken from the iTunes lyrics that were on the Plastic Beach game on the band’s official website that was going on for a while. This is the closest I think you could get.

#1042: Gorillaz – Pirate Jet

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Man, 2010. What a time to be alive, eh? Although I was alive in 2000, 2010 was the first proper year where I was aware that a change in the decades was happening. I thought it was something of a huge occasion. We were all quite deep into the 21st century. After all the shit that went down in the 2000s, 14-year-old me at least was feeling optimistic about the world for the times that were to come. Looking back on it in 2023, fair to say the decade had its highs and lows. One of them being the return of Gorillaz in 2010, with the release of Plastic Beach, five years on from Demon Days. Just when they needed them most, they returned.

That album’s been out for 13 years this month. While that does feel like ages ago, I do have the very clear memory of downloading it when it leaked online a few days before official release and listening to the whole thing in full. There were a lot of music downloading websites online in those days that wouldn’t survive a week in these times. If only I were on the home computer, I’d be able to tell you the exact date I did. Monitor’s busted though. Power on button just won’t click when you press it. One thing’s for sure was that the album was a hit with me from that day. Each song just seemed to be one banger after the next. An emotional rollercoaster with a ton of variety in each track. No track on there was bad. Though now there may be some established tracks that have been labelled as the ‘not so good’ ones – looking at ‘Glitter Freeze’ and unfortunately ‘Sweepstakes’ (which I also got tired of after a while, but was probably one of my favorites on there for a looong time – you can’t deny they’re at the very least interesting. Demon Days is widely regarded to be the classic. It will always be Plastic Beach for me.

And so, after this almost hour-long experience filled to the brim with guest vocalists and instrumental twists and turns, the one and only Damon Albarn (or 2D if you really want to get into it) takes the lead to close it all out with ‘Pirate Jet’, a track that I could only describe as this groovy pub-like singalong. The lyrics consist of only one verse that’s sung twice, kind of making a sarcastic joking point on how everything’s great while humanity is wasting water and using all these excessive amounts of plastic for no good reason. The album had a bit of an environmental theme going on throughout, don’t know if you knew. A vocoder-effected vocal sings the title phrase from the very start of the song too, setting the swinging rhythm that sets the bed for frizzy synthesizer chords, soulful backing ‘ooh’ harmonies and these little tinkling bells that are actually the last instruments you hear on the record as all of the others slowly fade out. Definitely has an ‘ending credits song’ feel to it. I couldn’t picture a greater note for the album to go out on.