
Damon Albarn – Everyday Robots
Damon Albarn, of Blur and Gorillaz fame, has always been a maverick, pushing pop music into fairly atypical, frequently imaginative territory. On his first full-length solo album, the legendary alt-rocker, working from a slower, more subdued, sonic position, has mostly eschewed easy hooks in favor of a meticulously produced palette of gray sounds. Though much of Everyday Robots is rainy day music at its most drizzly, Albarn remains a consummate artist, bringing a certain level of affable whimsy to a somewhat melancholy affair. The record begins eerily on its title track with a 1960 sample from Lord Buckley as the former British comic declares, “They didn’t know where they was going, but they knew where they was, wasn’t it…” In the context of Albarn’s skeptical ruminations on modern technology, the quote provides indirect commentary on our contemporary sense of self, and our present reliance on digital tools to locate and[...]