Damon Albarn
launched
Gorillaz
's
Song Machine
at the dawn of 2020, planning to release one new song a month, then rounding up the results as an almanac at the end of the year. Despite the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic,
Albarn
managed to more or less stick to his schedule, issuing a new song a month until the October release of
Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez
. As the project was started prior to the pandemic,
Strange Timez
isn't strictly a reflection of life in the time of the coronavirus; parts of it even feature musicians who passed not long after their contribution, such as
Tony Allen
, whose "How Far?" concludes the deluxe edition of the album. Nevertheless,
does pulse to the strange, ominous rhythms propelling a world beset by political strife and illness, often finding solace in retro stylings that conjure the gleaming 1980s and pan-global optimism of Y2K in equal measure. In other words,
may have followed a different template than previous
albums, but it is unmistakably a
album, a record that hides its melancholy among a series of sunny, genre-bending fusions. By its very nature, the album is dotted with cameos -- there are more here than there were on 2018's
The Now Now
, which was largely fronted by
himself -- and the likes of
Robert Smith
,
Beck
St. Vincent
Elton John
6lack
Fatoumata Diawara
, and
Peter Hook
help pull the album away from the realm of solipsism, suggesting that even when the world is largely isolated from itself, there is still the common language of music that binds us all. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine