2010 marks 12 years since Blur frontman, Damon Albarn and cartoonist, Jamie Hewelitt (Tank Girl) first teamed up to create their world famous “virtual band” Gorillaz.  Since then, the animated music project has gone through various changes, lineup and otherwise.  Albarn has remained the only consistent musical contributor to the group, with the projects self-titled debut incorporating the talents of Del The Funky Homosapien and producer, Dan the Automator, of which Damon had collaborated previously on the Deltron 3030 album.  2005 brought the sophomore release Demon Days, featuring appearance by such artists as De La Soul, MF Doom, and Dennis Hopper with production work by Danger Mouse.  The incorporation of fictional animated characters with the reality of the live musicians who’ve created them and rotating guest musicians has been a lofty concept since day one and has forced the group to make numerous adjustments in a variety of areas since their inception.

Over the years there has been repeated talk about making an animated film, but that was eventually abandoned, then pursued temporarily, and then abandoned all over again.  Around the time of DEMON DAYS, the duo took on a larger-than-life venture, attempting to perform “live” shows with 3-dimensional holographic versions of the characters/band members that they’d created.  Their abilities to manifest these visual-centric performances were first demonstrated at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Novemeber of 2005, with a follow up performance at the 2006 Grammy‘s, which included an aging Madonna writhing in a leotard.  They announced plans to embark on a full-blown holographic world tour in 2007 – 2008 but, due to cost issues and the unreliability of the technology, that entire idea was eventually bagged.  In fact, by 2006, Albarn announced his intention to scrap the entire idea of Gorillaz as a  functional “band” altogether.  With the help of Terry Gilliam (Monty Python, Brasil, 12 Monkees, etc), the idea for a movie had resurfaced again, with Albarn focusing on that film as the primary vessel for the Gorillaz project.   “As far as being in a big band and putting pop music out there, it’s finished.” He Stated, “We won’t be doing that any more” (Uncut Magazine, Nov. ’06).  Of course, the animated film idea was scrapped yet again and the group did, in fact, release another pop album for the masses this year.  Now Gorillaz has even taken to the road to begin promoting the release but, after over a decade-plus of ups and downs, left turns, and the creators themselves losing interest, should we even be paying attention to this generally, overly-ambitious project at all anymore.  Based on their recent Oct. 7th appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman and the following 45 min. multi-media performance that they treated the audience to [featured below], the answer to that question is a resounding “probably.” Read the rest of this entry →