As Gorillaz soldier on with their intended 2020 project called Song Machine, the latest offering from what will turn into a collection of songs and videos by the end of the year (particularly if quarantine goes on in the UK as long as everyone is expecting), we’ve been given “Aries”–a bittersweet, nostalgia-drenched offering. This is, in large part thanks to Peter Hook’s musical contribution (with help from electrosynth goddess in her own right, Georgia). Best known as the co-founder and bassist for New Order (before being the one for Joy Division), the distinct sound of the band that innovated and perfected the electro sound in the 1980s is all over this latest single, billed as “Episode 3”–after “Momentary Bliss” featuring Slowthai and “Désolé” featuring Fatoumata Diawara–in this “Season 1” narrative. And it is this specific tinge that makes the track the perfect lament for an era of innocence we’ve forever lost (and one that didn’t even seem that innocent at the time until it was gone).
With a video, directed by the band’s primary animator, Jamie Hewlett, that features the return of Murdoc Niccals (who was noticeably absent from Gorillaz’s 2018 visuals for The Now Now), we see 2D at the center of the action as usual. Driving a “Fonda” motorcycle through an X-ray visioned tableau, we get a quick “wink wink” cut to the fact that it’s just a green screen–something of a testament to the DIY methods even the animated are forced to employ during the Time of Isolation and minimized contact. Indeed, one of the most resonantly standout lyrics of the track is: “I feel so isolated without you/I can’t play a happy tune on my own, so stay by my side/High or low tide.” Even if, one supposes, “staying” with someone means from afar au moment présent (which is why many of the subsequent collaborations on Song Machine will be contributed remotely). Chanting the words “high tide” in unison with Hook, it feels analogous to how we’re all about to drown in the wave of consequences that will inevitably keep hurling themselves at us as the aftermath of corona is felt for the foreseeable future.
To that end, Damon laments, “I’m standing on a beach in the distance/And even though you’re far away, can you see my red light?/It’s waiting to turn green”–unintended metaphors for both Jay Gatsby’s penchant for “cautious” showboating (recently re-created in Drake’s abode) and when life as we once knew it can “start” again. And who will be the person or entity that can “decide” that? For it seems, less than ever, no politician has the answer. And the ones they offer feel like they will inevitably lead their respective nations astray, or to certain death.
Fittingly, Murdoc wields a syringe in one of the final scenes, as though he alone has the antidote to make it all go away. Would that such a fantasy could be true. Yet one of the other superimposed “X-ray backdrops” to conclude the video is the image of two camels–associated immediately with the dry desert that is hope in this climate, with nary an oasis in sight. And not just because we’re locked down like the animals we cage in zoos, but because even if there is an “end,” it will only be the beginning of the fallout to come. That “high tide” coming to collect after all our time spent “lounging” in ambiguity. But, at the very least, the average Aries ego has been fed for the season–one in which any birthday celebrations have been rendered pathetic–with a song that, as Noodle put it, speaks to this zodiac sign’s “highly impatient and competitive” nature. Yet with that streak comes the fact that “many Aries have the fighting spirit of your mythological ruler.” Can that mythological ruler please step in now to do some damage control?
