The Gorillaz: What’s going on?
I wanted to take a step back from the Song Machine tracks this week and talk about what’s going on in the world of the Gorillaz.
Surprisingly enough, there is quite a bit to talk about surrounding the Song Machine project and just regular Gorillaz happenings.
First off, the Song Machine has changed recently. In the beginning, we saw statements from the band saying what Song Machine was going to be.
We knew that it was going to be an episodic, occasional song release, one at a time. This would go on to eventually compile the entire album of “Song Machine,” or so we thought.
However, after the release of “The Pink Phantom,” the Gorillaz decided to then just release the rest of the album all at once and named it “Strange Timez.” This of course meant sales of the album in several forms.
The additional tracks include:
“The Valley of the Pagans” (featuring Beck)
“The Lost Chord” (featuring Leee John)
“Chalk Tablet Towers” (featuring St. Vincent)
“Dead Butterflies” (featuring Kano and Roxani Arias)
Then we have the bonus tracks on the deluxe edition:
“Opium” (featuring EarthGang)
“Simplicity” (featuring Joan As Police Woman)
“Severed Head” (featuring GoldLink and Unknown Mortal Orchestra)
“With Love to an Ex” (featuring Moonchild Sanelly)
“MLS” (featuring JPEGMafia and Chai)
“How Far?” (featuring Tony Allen and Skepta)
Finally, the Japanese deluxe 2-CD edition comes with one more bonus track:
“Taxi Back to 80s Reykjavik”
You are able to purchase multiple different versions of a vinyl record, CD, and even cassette tapes. I’m curious to see if this is the comeback for cassette.
The deluxe edition of the vinyl even came with a small music box that plays the Song Machine theme tune.
I don’t know why they stopped releasing the songs one by one. It could be because they didn’t plan on making any music videos for the rest of the songs, or maybe it’s simply the fact that they wanted to sell albums.
Either way, I was very much enjoying the one by one delivery of the Song Machine, and I hope they do more in the future. The Album does state that this is season one of the Song Machine, so it’s safe to assume there will be more. I guess we will have to wait and see.
I also wanted to talk briefly about the Gorillaz Almanac. If you are unfamiliar with the almanac, it’s not actually a real almanac, it is just a fancy named book filled with art and other Gorillaz content.
If you have been following this you would know that the almanac was set to release on October 27th, but unfortunately, COVID had different plans for it.
The release has been delayed but if you ordered a version with a CD, that CD has already been delivered, in fact I got mine this week. And now we just wait in anticipation for the release of the almanac.
One last thing I wanted to brush over was the seemingly five hundredth mention of a Gorillaz movie being in the works. Of course I am always excited to hear this but I’ve learned from the past to not get too excited.
I guess I cant blame Damon, a movie is a lot of work so I wish him luck, I only hope that this time it becomes a reality.
