Blur - Think Tank

This is a really good album. Forget about it at your own peril. While I'm too young and not British enough to really understand this band (teenage years spent reading Q magazine drilled this fact into me before I realized that the publication was more or less Anglo-centric bollocks (a similar experience happened with Rolling Stone magazine or at least the Australian version, but the problems with that one was simpler, the writing was fucking shit.)) but I've always really appreciated their stuff; from the Brit-pop that made them famous, to the more avaunt-guard work on this album.

Ambulance is an amazing song once you get into it, really beautiful stuff, as is Good Song and Out of Time. Crazy Beat is a Fatboy Slim-produced last-ditch attempt at the charts, but least its fun and a nod back to those long gone days of Song 2. Jets is just really fucking cool.

This one of those albums that doesn't deserve to be forgotten. I know there's constant barrage of new music to our ears, and there's a more or less agreed upon list of classics to go back to. But remember, every year there is a wealth of quality and interesting albums that score (unfortunately adopting the Pitchfork scale here) a positive 7 to 8 and are subsequently forgotten about once the year is over. Maybe in criticism we should start playing favorites a bit more instead of the 'right' answers. Might mix up the lists a little bit, maybe for the better.

Blur - Ambulance

Kid Koala x Dan The Automator x Damon Albarn

Posted by A-Trak, this is Kid Koala on Tim Sweeny's Beats in Space show, doing what seems to be juggle routine for an unreleased track from the collaborators named above. Seriously nice music and I'd love to see it get a release.

Btw, what ever happened to that Deltron 3030 sequel? Surely it should be done by now.

Best.Of.2010 Honorable Mention - Plastic Beach

Damon Albarn claimed in an interview that Plastic Beach was the most pop Gorillaz album to date. This seemed a strange claim for an album that had no obvious powerhouse single, no Clint Eastwood, no DARE, no Feel Good Inc., no 19/2000. Yet on the other hand, gone were the more dubbed out, noodling tracks of the original, nothing as jarring as White Light, no huge choir outro. What’s left is a streamlined album, a trim commentary on the melancholy of consumer culture and the waste left behind.

And that’s all I’ve got really. I’ve been trying to write something intelligent about this album for a while now and I really can’t shed any more light on it that what’s already been written. While yes this is a lazy cop out, I don’t really feel like repeating anyone else.

At the end of the day, I’m a big Gorillaz fan and to me this album, the music and the multimedia around has been just as awesome and engrossing as the others. I really can’t recommend it highly enough to those who may have dismissed it as it lacked the huge singles of days gone past. It is simply one of the finest collections of songs for the year.

P.S. And seriously what is up with the whole cyborg Noodle thing? Mysterious stuff indeed.

Gorillaz - Sweepstakes (Ft. Mos Def & The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble) - LINK REMOVED