Gorillaz review: Damon Albarn and co produce spectacular show at 3Arena, Dublin
A file image of Damon Albarn, who brought Gorillaz to 3Arena in Dublin on Wednesday. (Photo by OLIVIER CHASSIGNOLE / AFP)
★★★★☆
Gorillaz may have started off as two men’s idea for a cartoon band, but they’ve become a world orchestra. Damon Albarn, a genius who can turn his hand to everything from unlikely sports anthems to operas about monkeys hatching from stone eggs, left the meat-and-potatoes rock of his peers behind years ago.
He’s proven it again with Gorillaz’ superb new album The Mountain, their best since 2010’s Plastic Beach, and at 3Arena in Dublin on Wednesday produced a suitably spectacular show that Irish fans will again get a chance to see on Thursday, before they return for Electric Picnic in September.
Genres to him are just ingredients to be gleefully shoved in the blender. Take any of the songs played tonight, from Indian-influenced cuts like to Albarn getting the melodica out for a title that could serve as the Gorillaz manifesto, to the syncopated shuffle of before the yearning chorus breaks through. They all laugh in the face of attempted categorisation.
You could also pick any song for a highlight but I’ll go for the sequence that began with On the three-screen spread across the back you had Bruce Willis speeding down the highway firing off a .45, out front you had a brilliant Yasiin Bey (or Mos Def as he was formerly known) leading the crowd, and then the ghost of Bobby Womack to complete the avalanche of sound and vision.
Yasiin, in a fetching pearly kings hat, then set off another explosion with from the new record with Syrian star Omar Souleyman adding his recorded contribution over the screaming bazaar sounds of several pungis (the wind instrument beloved of snake charmers).
A knock-out kept it going. Jamie Hewlett’s cartoon visions in a glorious wide-screen desert should take up permanent residence in the Las Vegas Sphere. The crowd, in the venue as rammed as I’ve ever seen it, went suitably delirious, giving it a bit of the Naughty By Nature ‘Hip Hop Hooray’ chant.
Albarn was more bandleader than frontman for a lot of the show, even standing aside when Bootie Brown ( ) or Argentine rapper Trueno (a superb ) took over. If you’ve put together a gang as marvellous as this, you might as well let them shine.
He excused not introducing everyone onstage by saying he wouldn’t have time to get through them all. Fair enough as there were multiple percussionists, four backing singers, at least three keyboard players and out front the spectacular mullet and shape throwing of guitar player Jeff Wotton and the equally admirable moustache of ace bass player Seye Adelekan.
That wasn’t the extent of the cast either as Dennis Hopper, Mark E Smith, Snoop Dogg, Paul and Mick from The Clash, and even Wile E Coyote turned up on the screens amongst Hewlett’s creations that took in everything from Disney’s to a giant version of virtual drummer Russel Hobbs throwing a whale at a jet fighter.
Now that is what you call a show.
