At 20 minutes shorter than your average Gorillaz project The Now Now feels shockingly complete.
The Now Now is capable of beguiling despite the babble – a Gorillaz album that, for once, acts not as loudspeaker for the cacophony of modern life, but a salve instead.
While The Now Now works as a piece, it does lack the sparks that come from the usual Gorillaz mess of ideas and personalities.
All in all, The Now Now feels fresh and present. Gorillaz have performed a type of sonic reset by stripping back their cast of collaborators, yet it exemplifies the strength of the songwriting at the group's core.
Gorillaz's latest album The Now Now celebrates the interpenetration of alternate realities and our mundane. It’s a reminder that realities, real or otherwise, are shared.
The lack of genre hopping (sticking mostly to electronic and pop) and guest stars, and the move away from tackling the issues of the day in favour of something more personal, makes The Now Now their most straightforward record, but it's no less interesting for that.
‘The Now Now’ is a more spaced-out affair, stripped of its star-studded collaborations and bathed in the apparent apathy of the modern age.
Where ‘Humanz’ leaned too heavily on swampy, generic hip-hop beats, ‘The Now Now’ prides itself on making 11 pop tracks that zip with energy, passion and an abundance of ideas.
It's that juxtaposition between sunshiny pop and yearning lyrics that defines much of The Now Now ... This latest chapter in the Gorillaz story sounds like a deeply confessional one.
In contrast to the lightness of the music—a sleek funk that feels like what songwriters and tech geeks from the ‘80s imagined the future would sound like—the lyrics are paranoid and despairing, sorrowful and confused.
Overall, The Now Now would work better if it fully embraced its melancholy.
At the end of the day, The Now Now isn’t as exciting as the band’s albums usually are, but it’s the best kind of album Gorillaz could give us: an antidote to the landscapes being sung about.
The Now Now is irresistibly chilled and the perfect palate cleanser a year on from Humanz‘s end-of-days disarray.
It’s quite easy to lose sight of the fact that ‘The Now Now’ was rushed out, recorded in February in time for festival season, as it sounds typically expansive and self-assured.
The album flows well, with a funky instrumental interlude picking up the pace nicely around the middle and its relatively short run time making it a light and breezy experience.
If you didn't like last year's Humanz for its glut of guests and lack of emphasis on Albarn's sandy, pinched warble, this is as close to a one-on-one experience with the erstwhile Blur singer as you're ever going to get.
What was once a rowdy, colorful party is now a soundtrack for bittersweet solitude.
The allure of isolation defines Damon Albarn’s latest project. With only a few guests on the album, he writes simple, mostly upbeat songs with words of exhaustion.
Even if The Now Now comes across as a solo effort from Albarn, it is still a far improvement on the bloated and playlist-y nature of Humanz which masked everything that is interesting about Gorillaz in its Jumbotron collaborators. Albarn is at his most interesting when he is in the spotlight.
On their sixth album, The Now Now, they cut back on the frivolities, attuning their colourful fiction to a grim reality.
It may be overly critical to complain that The Now Now is merely a collection of decent songs but Gorillaz can be so much better than that.
Just as 2010’s sprawling Plastic Beach had its introverted companion album The Fall, The Now Now is a breezy calm after Humanz’s storm.
The Now Now is a pleasant mood album while it's on—especially in comparison to Humanz—but it's still relatively low-impact.
The Now Now ultimately sounds exactly what it is: music made on the road as an escape from homesickness.
Stripped of the usual number of guests, The Now Now makes for a coherent record that acts more akin to a solo 2D album than full-on Gorillaz record.
‘The Now Now’ – a Damon Albarn solo album in all but name, and a perfectly likeable one at that – leaves that question feeling rather pertinent: if your imaginary band stop sounding like an imaginary band, what’s the point in pretending anymore?
It would be one thing if Gorillaz set out to make an album of effortless funk ditties and the tunes were good, but it’s another thing entirely if the melodies don’t hold up. Without a clear statement of intent beyond ‘good times,’ The Now Now fails to justify its existence.
Ostensibly a solo album by the band’s virtual ringleader 2-D, it pares down the guest stars and dials up the sense of desolation one feels when reading the morning paper.
The Now Now is an aimless and boring affair.
Damon Albarn unleashes some deep space funk on new Gorillaz record, however most of the tropes found within are a few years too late.
GORILLAZ REVIEW SERIES (6/7): The Now Now
The penultimate entry in my Gorillaz review series, The Now Now is forty minutes of pure sleep fuel, the musical equivalent of gallivanting on a desolate, dreary shoreline under a sour milk sky, drowning out your boredom by scouring the rock pools for seashells. It’s enjoyable at first, as the wistful whispering winds and the gentle crashes of waves spark the neural connections in your brain, prompting a deluge of childhood memories to rush the ... read more
The vibes of this album are so good, this is my favorite gorillaz album of all time thanks to 2d's voice and tbe way he exlresses his mental state in the songs
1 | Humility 3:17 feat. George Benson | 86 |
2 | Tranz 2:42 | 86 |
3 | Hollywood 4:53 feat. Snoop Dogg, Jamie Principle | 74 |
4 | Kansas 4:08 | 77 |
5 | Sorcererz 3:00 | 77 |
6 | Idaho 3:42 | 68 |
7 | Lake Zurich 4:13 | 76 |
8 | Magic City 3:59 | 79 |
9 | Fire Flies 3:53 | 80 |
10 | One Percent 2:21 | 71 |
11 | Souk Eye 4:34 | 89 |
#10 | / | Gaffa (Denmark) |
#11 | / | Vulture |
#25 | / | Albumism |
#47 | / | NME |
#69 | / | Fopp |
#75 | / | MOJO |
/ | GQ | |
/ | Radio X | |
/ | The Sydney Morning Herald |