PHILADELPHIA (Gorillaz.net) - Howling music with throbbing drumbeats echoes through the concert hall. A deep voice bellows, "IT'S ALIVE," as the band appears onstage. Except that the band -
Gorillaz - isn't alive at all.
The cute, jagged faces are cartoons on a huge screen.
Dreamt up by cartoonist Jamie Hewlett, who did the Tank Girl comics, and Blur frontman Damon Albarn, Gorillaz is an animated band.
Using the special effects of lights, video and film - and some carefully concealed "human collaborators" - the British band is making its first U.S. tour. "Jamie and me were sitting around and we thought, let's do a cartoon band and do it properly," Albarn said.
With four quirky characters drawn in Hewlett's angular, colorful style and songs that blend pop and reggae with the beats of old-school hip-hop, the album has sold 1.3 million copies in the United States .
"I think it's just the beginning of a whole new kind of music," Albarn said. "It's a mad combination of things."
The animated band's singer, 2-D, is a skinny, waifish boy with long legs, blue hair and a perpetually confused expression. Noodle, the guitar player, is a precocious Japanese girl who's an expert at martial arts. Rapper-drummer Russel is an oversized man with empty, Orphan Annie eyes. And grubby, troublemaker Murdoc always has his bass in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Albarn and producer Dan "the Automator" Nakamura maintain Gorillaz is a real band and they are merely "human collaborators. The problem is cartoons are more suited for the two-dimensional realms," said Nakamura, adding, "It's not your traditional concert."
Videos and an intricate animated Web site first brought the characters to life. While the virtual band easily can appear on television and the Internet, the live tour is a different matter. (MTV2 has sponsored the 10-show tour, which made a stop Friday at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. They will play Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles this week.)
A massive screen covers the entire stage. The top half is a video screen; the bottom is made of mesh and is slightly sheer. Images are projected on the mesh by projectors on the side of the stage. Silhouettes of the eight musicians, including Albarn and Nakamura, are somewhat visible through the screen.
Campy, playful videos bombard the audience with rapidly changing images in lurid colors. The cartoon band races around in tanks. Noodle skips happily. Murdoc grimaces and does pelvic thrusts. Dozens of huge gorillas lope across the screen. Lyrics flash in huge letters and sometimes the band members' thoughts pop up on screen.
"It's strangely liberating," Nakamura said.
Unlike previous cartoon bands, such as the Archies, Josie and the Pussycats and Jem and the Holograms, the characters are not each voiced by one specific person. Albarn's distinctive wailing, whiney British voice does a lot of the vocals, and other guest stars are heard, including rapper Del Tha Funky Homosapien, Japanese singer Miho Hatori and Buena Vista Social Club singer Ibrahim Ferrer.
There will be more Gorillaz projects, Albarn said, but after this tour he will be taking a break. "They're going to exist in the Internet for a while," he said. "That's the good thing about cartoon characters, you can put them in a box and take them out again."
