Review Summary: All I wanna do is dance...
Gorillaz debut was a hit. With a few Smash hit singles and a popular LP under the group's belt, Damon Albarn set out to record the group's next release. The Iraq war had cast a shadow of doubt and paranoia over the world and Demon Days is an album that encases that fear into music. Demon Days is a fitting name as the songs here are dark, moody and anxious. Backed by the hit singles Feel Good Inc. and DARE and an array of collaborators including De La Soul, MF DOOM, Shaun Ryder and even Dennis Hopper, Demon Days was understandably a massive success. But is it an album that has stood the test of time? Let's look inside these Demon Days and see if we are indeed still feeling good about them.
Musically, Demon Days is a colossal step up from Gorillaz' debut album. With producer Danger Mouse on board, the record sports a much cleaner and polished sound. While their first record invoked images of murky swamps and graveyards, Demon Days is the sound of lonely hill in the evening, the light of the sun casting a sickly glow or an abandoned high rise building. The vast but dreamy melancholy of 'El Mañana' and the sharp minimalist 'O Green World' play with this tense anxious feeling that everything that could go wrong is going wrong and there's nothing we can do to stop it. The booming funk rock of 'Feel Good Inc.' and the (aptly named) piano jam 'Every Planet We Reach Is Dead' capture this desperate and lost tone perfectly mainly through Albarn's vocal performance. "What are we going to do?" He croons over a thumping piano beat supplied by Ike Turner. Even the records more upbeat moments like the dance floor bangers 'Dirty Harry' and 'DARE' feature this uneasy tone in their sounds. Dirty Harry for example breaks into a string backed explosive rap bridge with rapper Bootie Brown screaming about PTSD and the Iraq War. "All I wanna do is dance" he sighs before the track's electro funk beat kicks back in. It's a jarring but haunting and effective change and it fits perfectly with the song's themes. If we just forget about issues and dance, everything will be alright?
An interesting thing to note is now the dusty wandering dub of their debut is gone, now taking a more tight, polished alt-rock trip hop funk sound. The slick grooves of 'Kids With Guns' and the distorted bass heavy 'All Alone' combine rap with live instrumentation to create an incredible feeling. The surreal experimentation is gone too, with heavier focus on a cohesive unit of songs rather than a collection of spiralling trip hop dub jams. The dub influence is still noted. The grand finale 'Demon Days' notably features a slow reggae beat and the melodica appears from time to time. There's a larger focus on strings and choirs here too, creating a grandiose powerful sound, most prominent on Dirty Harry and Demon Days. It's a strong album musically, with the trip-hop funk genres mashing extremely well, no less thanks to Albarn and Danger Mouse's focus on making a record where every track could be a hit single. It payed off well
Lyrically, Demon Days represents the anxiety and fear of the post 9/11 world. The record deals with violence in youth ('Kids With Guns'), environmental issues ('O Green World'), the impending finality of death ('Last Living Souls'), PTSD ('Dirty Harry') and the feeling that nothing we do will matter, because in the end, we have no control ('Feel Good Inc.', 'Every Planet We Reach Is Dead'). "Feel Good" Albarn whimpers, sounding incredibly lost and lonely. It's a dark album, a continuing spiral of fear Up until the final few tracks. The odd but haunting 'Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head' features actor Dennis Hopper reciting a story of strangers invading a foreign village and mining it for its resources only to incur the wrath of the mountain called Monkey which watches over the village and its people, over a pulsating electro-funk beat. The lyrics undeniably draw parallels to the Iraq War and the struggle from Oil in the Middle East. The final two tracks, 'Don't Get Lost In Heaven' and 'Demon Days' form a sort of optimistic ending. "Turn yourself around into the sun" the choir harmonises. It's a comforting end to a dark and uneasy record, but one that makes you think. If we turn ourselves around, the pain will stop.
In short, Demon Days may be Albarn's masterpiece, along with Blur's 13. It's a tense but knowing record that blends trippy beats and slick bass grooves and acoustic guitars to create a truly lovely sound, and lyrically it's a strong, emotive rollercoaster. Only the skittish punk rock of 'White Light' takes the album down slightly but at only two minutes it's hardly an issue. Even today, Demon Days can be applied to modern politics and life, working far better than Humanz did. A true modern masterpiece.
Standout tracks
Kids With Guns
O Green World
Dirty Harry
Feel Good Inc.
El Mañana
Every Planet We Reach Is Dead
All Alone
DARE
Demon Days
Standout lyrics:
"Now everybody's dancing, the dance of the dead" - Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head
"God only knows it's
getting hard to see the sun coming through
I love you
But what are we going to do?" - Every Planet We Reach Is Dead
"At night I hear the shots
Ring so I'm a light sleeper
The cost of life
It seems to get cheaper
Out in the desert
With my street sweeper
The war is over
So said the speaker with the flight suit on
Maybe to him I'm just a pawn
So he can advance
Remember when I used to dance
Man, all I want to do is dance" - Dirty Harry
