Never the most popular of pop stars, Damon Albarn is presumably used to being called names. Even the other members of Blur seem unable to resist the temptation. Bass player Alex James famously mocked Albarn's Britpop-era pin-up status by publicly noting his resemblance to the boyishly charming panto character Buttons. When Albarn began dabbling in rap, James waggishly referred to the singer as "the blackest man in west London". Now Albarn is being held responsible for a leading UK company cutting its profit forecast by £30m: last February, EMI records claimed that its dip in sales was due to the late delivery of Coldplay's third album and the second release by Gorillaz, Albarn's cartoon-themed, hip-hop-influenced side project.
This was not a statement likely to instil confidence in the future of Britain's most august record company. You can understand EMI banking on Coldplay, a band who seem no more likely to throw a musical curveball than they are to star in a hardcore porn film. However, pinning hopes on Gorillaz seems a desperate move. The side projects of moneyed rock stars are hardly renowned as guaranteed hit-making machines. Gorillaz's eponymous debut bucked the trend and sold 4m copies, but more by default than by design: it was a scrappy collection of interesting but largely undercooked ideas, powered by the atypically catchy single, Clint Eastwood.
Nor can you imagine the fatted calf being slaughtered in the EMI boardroom when Demon Days finally arrived. Albarn has replaced Gorillaz's other main musical player, hip-hop producer Dan "The Automator" Nakamura, with Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, infamous for illegally mixing Jay Z's rapping with the Beatles' music on bootleg CD The Grey Album. A cursory listen suggests Nakamura took the tunes with him. The closest Demon Days gets to Clint Eastwood's undeniable pop sass is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a track called Dirty Harry, which at least features something resembling a chorus, albeit one delivered by that least lovable of guest artists, the children's choir.
Tracks appear to ramble undisciplined through disconnected ideas: dub bass, Dylan-ish singing, new wave synthesizers, a piano interlude, a vaguely African guitar twang, lumpy programmed beats, a Song 2-like riff and distorted vocal on O Green World. Worse, Demon Days appears to be a concept album about environmental issues: Fire Coming Out of a Monkey's Head features actor Dennis Hopper delivering a parable in which "the people known as Happy Folk" have their lives ruined by militaristic forces. You suspect that by this point in the album, the EMI folk were kept from throwing themselves from the nearest high window only by the thought of dependable old Coldplay.
But first impressions could not be more wrong. Demon Days goes boldly against the current trend for brash immediacy and instead repays time and effort on the part of the listener. Songs that at first sound half-finished, reveal themselves merely to be subtle. Kids With Guns seems like a vague mumble, until you notice the contrast in Albarn's vocal. It starts virtually catatonic, then suddenly becomes heart-rending on the line "they're turning us into monsters": a world of tooled-up dead-eyed children that's part dystopian fantasy and part sink-estate reportage is duly conjured up. Similarly, the choir on Dirty Harry turn out to be singing "I need a gun to keep myself from harm" - the token defence of the hip-hop star caught with an illegal firearm, chillingly transposed into youthful mouths.
Amid the dextrous conjunctions of styles - Feel Good Inc switches between folksy indie strum and grimy bass rumble - the album positively leaks melodies. There are gorgeous tunes hiding everywhere, buried in echoing backing vocals and icy synthesised refrains, lurking beneath MF Doom's rapping on November Has Come. Indeed, for someone usually painted as an overweening egomaniac, Albarn seems perfectly capable of playing second fiddle to his guest stars, letting Roots Manuva take a star turn on All Alone, ceding DARE to the unlikely partnership of Shaun Ryder and Neneh Cherry.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Demon Days is how much of it recalls the last Blur album, Think Tank. Ten years ago, any comparison between Blur's oeuvre and a sort of dub/hip-hop/lo-fi indie/world music hybrid would have seemed utterly implausible. Yet El Mañana or Every Planet We Reach Is Dead could have slipped comfortably on to either album.
It somehow only magnifies Albarn's achievement that Demon Days seems of a piece with Think Tank. With his last two releases, Albarn has done something his Britpop peers singularly failed to do: forge a unique signature style from wildly disparate elements. It might not be enough to single-handedly rescue EMI's profits, but really, it's about time people stopped calling him names.
