The Permanent Sun

Gorillaz featuring Beck “The Valley of the Pagans”

Beck and Damon Albarn are two of the most versatile artists of all time, both capable of working up to a high standard in a very wide range of styles. So what happens when you put these two clever chameleons together on a track? Well… you basically just get them both on autopilot and singing default-mode melodies over a track that sounds like it was made of spare parts from the Güero and Demon Days records. It’s a good but totally unsurprising song. I think what really happened here is their core styles overlap a bit too neatly, so it just becomes a composite of them both. Albarn’s more interesting collaborations tend to be with artists who he has much less in common with, so there’s a bit of tension in how they push and pull. This is more like two magnets snapping together.

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