It starts virtually catatonic, then suddenly becomes heart-rending on the line 'they're turning us into monsters': a world of tooled-up dead-eyed children that's part dystopian fantasy and part sink-estate reportage is duly conjured up. Kids With Guns seems like a vague mumble, until you notice the contrast in Albarn's vocal. Songs that at first sound half-finished, reveal themselves merely to be subtle. Demon Days goes boldly against the current trend for brash immediacy and instead repays time and effort on the part of the listener. You suspect that by this point in the album, the EMI folk were kept from throwing themselves from the nearest high window only by the thought of dependable old Coldplay.Д«ut first impressions could not be more wrong. Worse, Demon Days appears to be a concept album about environmental issues: Fire Coming Out of a Monkey's Head features actor Dennis Hopper delivering a parable in which 'the people known as Happy Folk' have their lives ruined by militaristic forces. Tracks appear to ramble undisciplined through disconnected ideas: dub bass, Dylan-ish singing, new wave synthesizers, a piano interlude, a vaguely African guitar twang, lumpy programmed beats, a Song 2-like riff and distorted vocal on O Green World. The closest Demon Days gets to Clint Eastwood's undeniable pop sass is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a track called Dirty Harry, which at least features something resembling a chorus, albeit one delivered by that least lovable of guest artists, the children's choir. A cursory listen suggests Nakamura took the tunes with him. Albarn has replaced Gorillaz's other main musical player, hip-hop producer Dan 'The Automator' Nakamura, with Brian 'Danger Mouse' Burton, infamous for illegally mixing Jay Z's rapping with the Beatles' music on bootleg CD The Grey Album. Nor can you imagine the fatted calf being slaughtered in the EMI boardroom when Demon Days finally arrived. Gorillaz's eponymous debut bucked the trend and sold 4m copies, but more by default than by design: it was a scrappy collection of interesting but largely undercooked ideas, powered by the atypically catchy single, Clint Eastwood. The side projects of moneyed rock stars are hardly renowned as guaranteed hit-making machines.

However, pinning hopes on Gorillaz seems a desperate move.

You can understand EMI banking on Coldplay, a band who seem no more likely to throw a musical curveball than they are to star in a hardcore porn film.

This was not a statement likely to instil confidence in the future of Britain's most august record company. Now Albarn is being held responsible for a leading UK company cutting its profit forecast by ВЈ30m: last February, EMI records claimed that its dip in sales was due to the late delivery of Coldplay's third album and the second release by Gorillaz, Albarn's cartoon-themed, hip-hop-influenced side project. When Albarn began dabbling in rap, James waggishly referred to the singer as 'the blackest man in west London'. Bass player Alex James famously mocked Albarn's Britpop-era pin-up status by publicly noting his resemblance to the boyishly charming panto character Buttons. Even the other members of Blur seem unable to resist the temptation. N ever the most popular of pop stars, Damon Albarn is presumably used to being called names.

The gorillaz demon days album