Are the Gorillaz trying too hard?

Wow, this album just popped out of nowhere. We almost didn't want it, it came so fast. The Gorillaz are releasing their albums at an alarming rate, with three albums (not counting singles and imports) in less than a year and a half. Are the Gorillaz trying too hard?

It certainly seems so. The quality of their albums has decreased from the beginning. Their first self-titled release was a well-done five-star album. Their second release, G Sides, was really good, with several interesting remixes and a few songs that were left out of the original album. Now we have Laika Come Home, a poor collaboration with the possibly non-existent Spacemonkeyz. It's sad that we can never really trust the validity of the Gorillaz, with their constant tendency to stray away from realism.

Laika Come Home is, of all the music stereotypes I can think of, a reggae album, and a fairly bad one at that. It takes twelve Gorillaz songs from the original album, remixes them, and adds reggae. The result is not that good.

Yes, many of the sounds that are located in this album are cool and high-tech sounding, but the fact that they are all computer generated really doesn't fit in with the trailing remixed voices and the mediocre voice of who I would like to call "The Reggae Man." "The Reggae Man" is the African-American who sings really fast to the point where it's almost a rap, and he comes in right after the remixed voices. It doesn't fit. It's almost uncomfortable. This subtracts from the CD's quality and it's overall sound.

Despite it's poor sound (for the most part), this is a really interesting album, visually, and you can tell how well-produced it is. Right from hearing that it's called, "Gorillaz vs. Spacemonkeyz: Laika Come Home", you are instantly captivated by this possible premise, and just the title could get you to buy the album (unless you're already a die-hard Gorillaz fan, like me).

Open the album, and you'll find a small two-sided poster, with pictures of the Gorillaz "in action" that I will not reveal. Look a little more, and you'll find one of those little flipbooks that is included in pretty much every album you buy. Inside this flipbook are pictures of rockets, spaceships, airplanes, universal plot points, and monkeys. Lots of monkeys. You'll also find that the Spacemonkeyz have renamed their versions of the songs, turning songs such as "Punk" into "De-Punked," or "Man Research" into "Monkey Racket," which is all quite cute and funny. If only the actual CD could be this interesting.

Yes, onto more details of the music. This record just moves too slow, and seems to have been rushed, as if the Gorillaz just had to get another CD out, when we weren't really anticipating it as much as they thought. It also seems to be trying too hard to be original for a third time, but it does, as disappointed as I am to say it, fail.

Every song seems to be the same, for the most part. They're interesting for just about the first three times you hear them, and they suddenly seem to come together after these playings, to where you don't want to hear them anymore, and not a single one makes it on your playlist. You're almost appalled, but then in the last 18 minutes of the album, there is one track that actually plays out very well: the M1A1 remix, "Lil' Dub Chefin'". But guess what? It has three bonus tracks after it, and even though those are also pretty good, you're suddenly just too lazy to put it on your playlist, or to listen to it again. A poor decision made by the album's producers.

In the end, this record ends up just being disappointing. It was rushed, plays too slow, and isn't has original as it's predecessors. Maybe, by some great stroke of luck, the Gorillaz will see into the minds of their fans, and produce an album as great as the original. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Rating: D