Gorillaz – Demon Days

You heard it here first: the Japanimated cartoons that landed on this month’s cover of Wired are down with everyone from De La to Dennis Hopper. Just a few years ago, former Blur frontman Daron Albarn’s multimedia collective of alter egos, Gorillaz, sold six million copies of its self-titled debut. This time around, Albarn has once again skipped the glossy photo ops for cutting-edge videos and artwork straight out of Akira. This is all just another way of saying these guys are the best cartoon band since Jem.

The follow-up, Demon Days, ups the ante both musically and visually – the CD comes with some of the most intriguing cover art … well, ever. The music, like its neo-hipster cartoon members, seems to have originated from a future decade of cool. The Gorillaz are futurists in the same way that P-Funk were. The image and the sounds seem to suggest that, after the coming apocalypse, things get funkier. Innovative as it is satisfying, Demon Days enlists DJ Dangermouse of last year’s masterful mash-up The Grey Album as its producer, and he more than deftly handles a cameo-heavy and ultra-unique blend of post-Blur rock, hip-hop, and electronica.

While the album’s club-ready and unassumingly funky anthems “Feel Good, Inc” and “Dirty Harry” and the progressive hip-hop of “November has Come” may suggest otherwise, Demon Days, is most concerned with a funky post-nuclear winter pathos. The slow thrump and whisper vocals of the Clash-ian “Kids With Guns” taken alongside tracks like “Every Planet We Reach is Dead” and the Dennis Hopper-narrated parable “Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head” push this album into decades ahead of time, both sonically and socially. Call it Blade Runner with breakbeats.

Like all science fiction, Demon Days, may just be more revelatory of the current state today’s music culture than of things to come. In a world where Lil’ Jon is as likely to top the charts as The White Stripes, Albarn’s Gorillaz have succeeded in seamlessly integrating a dazzling spectrum of musical forms. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a more realized meld of hip-hop, electronica, and post-rock. The future has never looked brighter.