After an overly ballooned with tracks and collaborators fifth album, Humanz, just last year (and on the heels of the global reckoning initiated by the Trump presidency), Gorillaz have done an about-face in terms of minimalism with their latest record, The Now Now. Establishing a sort of stoner redundancy that is manifest in their “good vibes only” video for “Humility,” it’s evident that Damon Albarn is trying his best to stay positive amid these adverse times–despite the fact that his alter ego, 2-D, is clearly “love drunk.”
Maybe this is why Gorillaz opts to kick of The Now Now with this single, in an overt attempt to keep things light when so much feels hopelessly dark. Like an impossibly handsome middle-aged siren, Damon declares, “Calling the world from isolation/’Cause right now, that’s the ball where we be chained.” Who knows if that ball we’ve been chained to that he’s referring to is the collective den of hate that’s settled firmly into the fiber optic cables that provide us with that great time-suck away from real life called the internet? It seems likely as he laments, “See the state I’m in now?” as he refers to his solitude, both self-imposed and enforced by others who would prefer to remain dipped into their screens as opposed to engaging with something or someone real. Then again, for all we know, the song could simply be about Justin Frischmann again, with Damon referring to himself as “the lonely twin” sans his true “other.”
With a sound that could easily be billed as Blur 2.0 (lest you forget their “twenty-first century direction” on Think Tank), “Tranz” is beautifully awash with a melding of keyboards and synths that gently try to relate to one’s fellow man as Damon sings, “When you get back on a Saturday night and your head is caving in, do you look like me, do you feel like me?/Do you turn into your effigy?” Of course, as we all well know by now, in Damon’s case, his effigy is 2-D. Not necessarily always ideal, but a small price to pay for animated immortality. Plus, 2-D has clearly kept Damon young at heart if he’s still willing to make references to coming back from a bar or club on a Saturday night when he could just as easily stay in watching Criterion Collection films in his cush prime London home.
As though Lana Del Rey got a hold of the time spent on the lyrics of the album, “Hollywood” featuring Snoop Dogg and Jamie Principle is a standard exploration of the sinister stereotype of Tinseltown, which, as we all know by now, is extremely seedy under that cracked veneer. Still, Damon can’t help but swoon, “Hollywood, she’s so seductive/She’s got me looking for that dream/I bow down/She knows how to do it/Exactly the way I like it.” Basically comparing her to a whore who will perform all his favorite sexual items on the menu, Damon gets taken in, even in the face of all we’ve learned about Hollywood in the past year alone. “Hollywood is alright…but you you never know what’s real.” Strangely, this statement is something of the antithesis to the one made in “Humility,” in which Damon seems to be making a rallying cry for us to stop buying into all the fake trappings that the modern era has only fortified our obsession with. With the Hollywood dream (and the nightmare it usually tends to become) in mind, Gorillaz go back to the start of the representation where all damaged goods come from: the Midwest. On “Kansas,” rather than telling us about the origin story of the Dorothy-like “innocent” that comes to L.A., Albarn loosely uses The Wizard of Oz analogy of being on his journey back home in terms of returning to an emotional state in which he might not feel like such shit over being rejected by the one he loves and the one he can seemingly never forget about. He rues, “Am I incapable of healing? The memory of my fall from grace in your heart/I’m on my journey home with no fuel, alone I think I’ll coast a while.” The woeful image conjured of Damon/2-D driving alone on a yellow brick road is easily translatable to your own tragic love life, and though you know you should “find another dream,” the heart simply won’t let you click your heels and get back to a place where you weren’t so mentally fucked.
In keeping with the tempo of “Kansas,” “Sorcererz” a slow-paced ditty with a hint of fastness beneath the surface that finds 2-D (or Damon’s effigy) asking, “Hey what is this droning?/I hear it, then/Over on me.” Again a reference, in part, to the obsession with that which exists on screens (media, outrage, calamity, etc.), the question being posed also alludes to the proverbial drone of society, how it sounds, how it acts, how it reacts. The more people become prone to faux anger (faux in that it’s anger that merely feeds off headlines tailored to provoke and distract), the louder the sound of the drone.
So “Sorcererz,” as they are wont to with their magic, take us back to the Midwest on “Idaho,” an unabashed ode to Damon’s touring days with Gorillaz back in 2017–this very song, in fact, written on said tour bus. With a trippy, space age sound (but of that 60s imagining of space variety), we’re given a snapshot of the vertical panhandle. Not to mention an ode to the state itself, because for some reason, Europeans still find ways to love America. And, what’s more, Damon can’t resist interweaving the Hollywood/Idaho connection (lest we forget the Lucy Desi Comedy Hour episode, “Lucy Goes to Sun Valley”) by alluding to Bruce Willis’ ski lodge, in addition to the fact that Steve McQueen, “the king of cool,” also owned property in Idaho, even though “Tinseltown is still down the road.” But that doesn’t mean one can’t escape into the realness generally relied upon to be created by backlots. Which is precisely what Damon does as he describes, “There’s a beauty on the road/And everyday I look out of the bus/Silver linings getting lost.” A bit grim there at the end, but that’s probably only because Damon didn’t want to leave the sanctuary of the state’s soothing aesthetics.
The instrumental “Lake Zurich” is something of an extension of “Idaho,” a little interlude that leads us to “Magic City” (again, we feel The Wizard of Oz as something of an underlying theme, even if it was Emerald City). Once again, Damon as 2-D takes us to a Midwestern tableau (for Lake Zurich is in Illinois), while also suggesting that he’s gone from Zurich to New York, forced to endure the duty free shop that ominously warns, “Last chance to buy before you fly.” But in truth, you can’t “fly” in this life unless you don’t buy.
Doing a bit of the Arctic Monkeys’ “Four Out of Five” shtick, Damon as 2-D looks down upon mankind from on high and remarks, “Look there’s a billboard on the moon.” This could be both prophecy and the effects of the drugs 2-D has taken to make him visit this so-called “Magic City,” causing him to lament, “You got me lost in Magic City/You got me questioning it all/I hope that I make it home by Wednesday/And this Magic City lets me go.”
The drug-addled ambience of “Magic City” intensifies on “Fire Flies,” a track that serves as something of a continuation of the “dismantled relationship” motif on “Kansas” as 2-D remarks, “All you ever get from the sonnet is the count of the fallen man/Every calling cost made to your heart/You were in the kind of game that put the force in me I was ever chasing fireflies.” Fireflies, of course, are an ideal metaphor for love that seems to burn so bright and brilliantly, but ultimately disappears before you can capture it long enough to sustain the light. Then again, maybe his true love in the end is heroin–for it did make him his most “incredibly productive.”
Light synths introducing us to “One Percent,” 2-D continues on his consciousness-expanded track with the hyper-perceptive narrative, “Every sound/Every sound from every world, receive/Every world, receiving you/Anyone/Not anyone of us who is in search/Everyone’s receiving you.” Again evocative of the strange parallel universe of computers (not just drugs), “One Percent” feels like a companion piece to “Busted and Blue” off of Humanz (featuring the same lyrical melancholy casting a dark light on technology with, “I was asked by a computer/A shadow on the wall/An image made by Virgil/To rule over us all”).
Combining a bit of every sound we’ve heard thus far off The Now Now, “Souk Eye” closes the eleven-track record. Damon as 2-D (but again, really just Damon) wraps up this theme of being a disappointment to the one he loves by choosing the glitz and the glamor (read: the drugs) of being a musician over her. Even after all the trouble he’s caused and the havoc he’s wrought in his personal life, 2-D admits he’s “waiting on L.A. to come find me, be forgiven/I’ll be a regular guy for you, I never said I’d do that.” And that’s quite a fortunate thing for those of us listeners who have come to rely on the erratic musical output of Gorillaz, always tied together by the fraught and ingenious lyrical explorations of Albarn.
