Gorillaz

Musically ... Gorillaz is a cutely caricatured blend of Albarn's eclectic Brit-pop and Nakamura's equally wide-ranging hip-hop, and it sounds almost as good as the band looks.

I guess if you whirled the idiosyncrasies of: the blur back-catalogue with some old skool hip-hop á la Grandmaster flash and some avant-garde breakbeat electronica ... the storm in an industrial strength coffee cup, would probably resemble something like this self-titled Gorillaz record.

He has sassy pop presence that has been subdued on the past couple of Blur records. Damon makes a strong return on this album. He hasn’t sounded this alive since Parklife in 1994.

Not bad for a band that doesn’t even exist.

Whereas the Beckster tends to wriggle cheekily along to his funk, and Badly Drawn Boy does his own thing in spite of it, Gorillaz don't give a rat's ass about acting funky; they just are.

Like any good cartoon, Gorillaz are difficult to love deeply, but impossible not to like.

Gorillaz is the definitive side-project: Even at its best, it's never more than a divergent one-off stint.

What could have been hipster reach is multiculti grasp of the sweetest kind.

Other than the cartoon gimmick, what sets The Gorillaz apart from the rest of the hip-hop groups is the fact that they combine the rock sensibilities in a band like Blur with the rap quirkiness of a group like Handsome Boy Modeling School. The result: extremely catchy music that will make you shake your booty til' the break of dawn.

The perfect west London group: a multi-cultural funky figment of white, indie, suburbanite imagination – an interactive cartoon band who use dub and hip-hop techniques to create sickly-sweet bubblegum pop.

Gorillaz is kind of a soundtrack CD to the jaw-dropping animation Web site gorillaz.com, but it stands alone as a playful piece of genre-squishing art pop.

Tons of hype, hi-tech multimedia artwork and eclectic beats laid down by Dan "the Automator" can't stop this album being ruined by Damon Albarn's truly awful whiney indie vocals.