The continually confounding brainchild of ex-Blur frontman Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett that is Gorillaz has returned with an ambitious project which is referred to as ‘Song Machine Season One.’ Due to release on October 23rd, the album is available to preorder now on the Gorillaz website as part of a deluxe limited edition which includes two sides of black vinyl, 20 pages of 12inch art, a CD and download link as well as an additional 3 12ich art prints and a label copy sheet. This hefty collection will set you back just shy of £60 but is remarkably good value for the amount of not just musical but also visual art content you will be receiving.
The band, if you could loosely term them as such, their digital personals are at least band shaped, have been gradually letting out singles from the project throughout the year. Albarn, who is famous for the all star collaborators on all of the Gorillaz albums, has focused his attentions closer to home after the America-loving ‘Humanz,’ project. Artists which feature on this album are some big names even for the Gorillaz standards and, refreshingly, include some top tier British names.
Among the British names featured on the album include Sir Elton John, Robert Smith, Leee John, Peter Hook, Georgia, Octavian, Kano, Slowthai and Slaves. The album also features a good variety of American talents and voices from as far afield as Mali, Fatoumata Diawara features on the track ‘Desole,’ which is sung in a mixture of French and English. The album is surely one of the most musically ambitions of the Gorillaz yet, taking on a broad variety of domestic influences and benefiting greatly from input taken from outside the Anglosphere.
According to The Fader, the project began as ‘a series of new one-off singles and music videos,’ which kicked off earlier this year with ‘Momentary Bliss,’ which featured British rapper Slowthai and rock band Slaves. The Fader continue that ‘Gorillaz will enter the livestreaming world with Song Machine Live,‘ which is due to stream on the 12th and 13th of December across multiple time zones and will feature ‘a mixture of live and animated visuals.’ There are obvious advantages to being a band which already has a complex and detailed digital persona and digital visual aspect to performance in the current situation and Song Machine Live is likely to be one of the most effective livestream performances of the year.
As well as releasing the album, according to NME, ‘Gorillaz will launch their own Apple Music show,’ called Song Machine Radio. Each episode will be hosted by one of the fictional characters which make up the Gorillaz persona, the first episode premiered today at 8pm and was hosted by 2D the would be lead vocalist and keyboard player who’s singing parts are voiced by Damon Albarn himself. The following episodes of the podcast will be released throughout November, on the 6th and the 23rd, and conclude on the 10th of December.
