Chicks and dudes, who you think is really kickin' tunes?

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

08/04/01 : Gorillaz - Gorillaz


Our third visit with Gorillaz and this is one where I liked the singles and was intrigued by the whole concept, so bought it (taking us to ten for the year) - I seem to recall I didn't mind it, but maybe there wasn't quite enough content for a whole album.

Yeah - the singles are very much the high points with "Clint Eastwood" and "19-2000" easily being the stand-out tracks. "Clint Eastwood" also has the distinct advantage that it doesn't overdo the Damon Albarn content - his voice is really quite annoying on a lot of this album. The other tracks are generally OK and have some quite interesting bleeps and rhythms involved, but there's not enough variety across the whole album to stop it getting repetitive - 56:56 is just too long, I'm afraid.

We're at #3 in the charts this week on their second week of a surprisingly long 53 week run, with this being as high as it got in its first two weeks - it's managed another nine runs over the years, with a total of 82 weeks and last being seen in '10. The rest of the top five Hear'Say, Eva Cassidy, Dido and a Billy Joel best-of and the highest new entries were Bee Gees (#6) and LeAnne Rimes (#7). 

Wikipedia has way more on the album than I was expecting (210 milliPeppers) and it tells us it's their debut album - and not a lot else of interest, to be honest. The only thing that jumped out at me was that Damon and Jamie, the band's creators didn't like each other when they first met, which only got worse when Jamie started seeing one of Damon's exes - and so they obviously then started sharing a flat. As you do. The album was well received critically, making quite a few year-end lists and commercially it did very well globally, getting to #2 in New Zealand and Norway, #1 in Chile and Uruguay and a very decent #14 in the US, selling seven million copies globally. It also sold pretty well here throughout the decade, appearing in the year-end charts in '01 (#22), '02 (#158), '05 (#185) and '06 (#202) - all of which earned them a place in the Guinness Book Of Records as the "most successful virtual band" (those people have too much time on their hands). 

This feels like just the sort of album there will be some weird limited edition release for and discogs.com tells us that you'll have to spent the princely sum of two pounds to pick up a normal version but if you want the super deluxe box set which features eight vinyl LPs, one of which is single sided then you're going to be paying £320 (and quite frankly you deserve to be robbed of it). This certainly isn't an album without merit (both conceptually and musically) but it wouldn't have hurt for it to have a bit more merit and a bit less repetition.

15/04/01 - Perfectly pleasant


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