Virgin Records Us
2007
D-Sides
About This Album
The Gorillaz B-sides and remixes collection D-Sides just emphasizes that Demon Days could have just as easily been called Damon Days. Even though Damon Albarn worked with collaborators like Danger Mouse on the second Gorillaz album, Albarn was its main sonic architect, and this is made even clearer by the songs that didn't make it onto Demon Days. Where the album honed a paranoid, melancholy -- but always accessible -- vibe, D-Sides is charmingly loose and eclectic; the stoned, rag-tag shuffle of "Don't Get Lost in Heaven (Demo)" is far more engaging, or at least immediate, than the choir and strings-bedecked version that appeared on Demon Days. The layered, doo wop-inspired harmonies and pianos on "Highway (Under Construction)" bear the marks of fiddling around in the studio, but appealingly so -- and that goes double for the new wave/electro ramble "Rockit," on which Albarn makes "blah blah blah" sound almost profound. D-Sides finds him working in styles he couldn't fit on the album (although "Spitting Out the Demons"' dubby gloom comes the closest to Demon Days' final cut): "68 State"'s moody synth noodling could soundtrack an anime dystopia; "Hongkongaton" fuses dub and music hall; and "People" could be the mutant offspring of Britpop and synth pop.
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 2,5,7,9,12 and 13)

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Disc 2 (try tracks 1,4 and 5)

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