Gorillaz - Demon Days live

For those of you unfortunate enough not to be familiar with Gorillaz, it's an experimental art and music project that was created in 1998 by Blur frontman Damon Albarn (one of my personal heroes) and comic book artist artist Jamie Hewlett. The project as a whole consists of actual music written and recorded by Albarn and an ever-evolving cast of guest artists and studio musicians, and a virtual band consisting of four animated humanoid cartoon characters who live in a fictional world brought to life by Hewlett through album art, internet sketches, comic shorts, and a brilliant interactive website. Despite the avant-garde nature of the project, the band has released three full studio albums to enormous amounts of commercial success and critical acclaim.

Their second studio album "Demon Days", released in 2005, went five times platinum in the UK, double platinum in the United States, earned five Grammy Award nominations in 2006, and won one of them in the Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals category. In the beginning of November that same year, there was a sold-out Gorillaz festival at the Manchester Opera House featuring one of the band's first ever live performances. They did the ENTIRE "Demon Days" album. The event was filmed by an EMI film crew for a DVD release simply called "Demon Days Live". I exaggerate not when I say that the concert is an absolute masterpiece. The band performed flawlessly, dimly lit and artistically silhouetted against screens in the interest of the project's nature and further shrouding the night in a sort of magic. The displays of art, projections, and cinematic direction are top class, and the entire DVD as a whole is just completely beautiful. It's all on YouTube in divided segments, though I highly recommend getting the real thing so you can enjoy watching it through uninterrupted.

Here is a particularly breath-taking piece of the night. Gorillaz performing "Don't Get Lost in Heaven" and "Demon Days", the two back-to-back closing tracks of the album and, in my opinion, one of the best CD-closing pieces I've ever heard. Damon Albarn is the English-sounding silhouette playing the piano and singing.

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