It seems Damon Albarn has spared us the 4-year wait between major releases and graced us with another LP just months after critically acclaimed ‘Plastic Beach’. And what makes this more exciting is that he did it all while on tour in America, using just his shiny new iPad, and all in time for release on Christmas Day! For free. What a quality guy.
While one can’t fault his festive spirit, it is still, after repeated listens, hard to gauge what exactly he has gone for here. ‘The Fall’ is a spirited potpourri of various styles, as is usually the case with Gorillaz. But it differs from the effortless fusion of Kano’s bleep-infested garage with Arabic sentiment as on Plastic Beach’s ‘White Flag’, and comes nowhere near tracks such as De La Soul style ‘Superfast Jellyfish’. Perhaps it is due to the time restraints he put himself under, but ‘The Fall’ ends up playing like a collection of B-sides plastered together, I suppose much like their previous ‘G-Sides’ or ‘D-Sides’ releases. Their sound is very much the same: plenty of interesting sounds and creative rhythms, yet for the most part it lacks the flair and groove we’ve come to expect from Albarn.
That is not to say, however, that it’s not worth listening to. ‘The Fall’ starts off solidly with a nod to Nine Inch Nails’ industrial technicality in ‘Phoner in Arizona’ and is followed up by two tracks in similar style. The unquestionable gem of the album is ‘Detroit’. Its sleepy, half-speed combination of reggae bass and warm guitar lines give it nonchalant summer sweetness akin to Major Lazer’s ‘Can’t Stop Now’. However, after this there is little that is particularly noteworthy. The latter half of ‘The Fall’ alternates between brooding electronic rumbling, tribal African drumming and neo-classical musing, believe it or not.
In this way, ‘The Fall’ has a distinctly conglomerate feel. And while you can’t really tout it as an evolution in his sound, if you take the album for what it is, an iPad-made soundtrack to his time in America, it really isn’t too bad – Albarn seems merely to be having some fun on here.
