Gorillaz, the frightfully hip collective of Blur frontman Damon Albarn, producer Dan "The Automator" Nakamura, and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett is coming to town, and by all accounts the show will be shit. Hewlett's cartoons will be projected onto a screen as the band toils away unseen, a state of affairs that led one inspired patron at a London show to exclaim, "It's like watching the television."

The album, an interesting but idiosyncratic affair, essentially refines the stylisms of U.N.K.L.E.'s Psyence Fiction to unit-shoveling pop benefit. For the players, such as Tank Girl artist Hewlett, the celestially inspired Nakamura, and guest Del Tha Funky Homosapien (who will not tour), this sort of windfall has been owed for quite some time.

For Albarn, Gorillaz is a step in the atonement process necessitated by 1995's extravagant follies--including Blur's ridiculous career zenith, the Great Escape album, and a chart-war pummeling courtesy of the mighty, mighty Oasis. Really though, Albarn seems quite intent upon showing the world he's a talented chap who can make all sorts of different types of music. The fact of Albarn's progression--from the shameless Stone Roses wagon-jumping of Leisure (Blur's debut) to the lo-fi splendidness of Gorillaz (by way of emulating the Kinks and Pavement)--drives the point home.

However, what is disheartening to an Albarn fan is his narcissistic tendency to create polar opposites of progression and profound retardation. From the vantage of whatever plane of enlightenment Albarn resides upon in a given moment, the artist then begins to criticize his own past work. In doing so, he criticizes the fans who hold those stupid songs dear, disregarding them as something of a malignant distraction. At the peak of his globetrotting, Albarn was responsible for some of the greatest pop songs of his generation.

I don't want to stand in the way of progress, but if Albarn can't at least honor the intellectual properties of his fans, then why should anyone honor the suggestion that he's any better than a rich rock star instigating a distended avant-garde sulk, simply because he can afford to? Hip-hoppin' indeed.