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How fun to live in an age when you can make up a band of virtual cartoon characters, get notable people to play on your album, and sell six million copies in the process. This is the story of Gorillaz, the four-member animated brainchild of Blur's Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, the latter of Tank Girl fame. For their second album, Demon Days, Albarn enlists the help of hip-hop producer du jour Danger Mouse. Gathering the likes of the London Gospel Choir, De La Soul, The Pharcyde's Booty Brown, MF Doom, Ike Turner, Happy Mondays/Black Grape's Shaun Ryder, and Dennis Hopper, Demon Days is still cool, but not nearly as exciting as its predecessor. While Blur records are sounding more Gorillaz-esque, Gorillaz are starting to sound like early Blur, with the odd rap thrown in. "Dirty Harry," with its lo-fi crackles, smacks of early hip-hop played through an accordion. "Feel Good Inc." finds Albarn warbling through a megaphone—a habit carried over from the Blur days—and could easily have turned up on that group's second album, Modern Life Is Rubbish. On the flip side, the excessive instrumentation of "Every Planet We Reach Is Dead" and the funky bounce of "Dare" save Demon Days from becoming wholly uninteresting.
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