DAMON'S DAY.(Damon Albarn, Gorillaz)(Concert Review)

If Americans are familiar with the thirty-seven-year-old British musician Damon Albarn, it is largely because of his rock band Blur's 1997 hit "Song 2," a rambunctious blast of doggerel that is still played in sports arenas and commonly referred to by its wordless chorus: "Woo-hoo!" In Britain, Blur's popularity peaked in the late nineties; by the time "Song 2" appeared, the band was routinely mocked as a group of posh softies--"students," in the country's class-conscious vernacular of derision--by fans of its principal and more successful rival, Oasis, a standard-bearer for foulmouthed, lager-positive "lad" culture. Yet Albarn was just getting interesting. As Blur stalled out, Albarn went to Africa and made an album with Afel Bocoum, who trained with the legendary Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure, and helped produce reissues of Trinidadian calypso and reggae music for Honest Jons, a London record label that he co-founded.

In 2000, Albarn and a friend, Jamie Hewlett, formed a new band, Gorillaz, officially consisting of four cartoon characters: 2D, a spacey blue-haired singer; Murdoc, a creepy bassist; Noodle, a Japanese female guitarist; and Russel, a hulking black drummer. (Imagine a post-punk version of Josie and the Pussycats.) The cartoon band, which was drawn by Hewlett, a professional artist who is famous for creating the comic strip "Tank Girl," was an ingenious conceit, enabling Albarn to orchestrate a comeback without showing his face. Albarn, who writes the band's songs and plays almost all the instruments, could now make music with whomever he pleased, and without the problems that plague live groups--members who show up hung over at rehearsals or photo shoots, or who simply quit. A cartoon band can run forever.

Gorillaz was instantly successful: its first album, "Gorillaz," sold 1.6 million copies in the United States, partly on the strength of the band's videos, which combine old-fashioned hand-drawn animation, computer-generated effects, and live-action photography. Two Gorillaz videos from 2001 are currently on the iTunes Top 100 video chart. The characters don't talk in the videos, and the visual scenarios--one of which features the band members sitting silently in a dune buggy that is rocketing over what looks like the Golden Gate Bridge--usually have little to do with the song lyrics, which tend to be collections of pleasant-sounding catchphrases: "Get the cool shoeshine," "Are we the last living souls?" The images are gorgeous, but what makes Gorillaz universally appealing is Albarn's music, a blend of low-key hip-hop and mellifluous pop, ornamented by an assortment of African and Asian instruments. The new Gorillaz album, "Demon Days," which was released in May, has lingered in the Top Forty of the U.S. charts for six months, and sales here of the group's two albums have exceeded those of all eight Blur albums combined.

At the center of a typical Gorillaz song is a sunny and slightly childlike sound: a sweet melodic figure, a piano trill, or a burst of children's voices. Albarn's triumph is in preventing his friendly tootling from becoming cloying; he succeeds no doubt partly because he co-produced the Gorillaz albums with hip-hop artists, the first one with Dan (The Automator) Nakamura, the second with Brian Burton, a.k.a. Danger Mouse. Albarn also enlisted guest artists for both albums, including the rappers Del Tha Funky Homosapien and De La Soul and the singers Neneh Cherry and Shaun Ryder, all of whom had big careers in the nineties which have since waned.

This may say more about Albarn's catholic taste than about his ability to sign up current stars. Like the French-Spanish musician and producer Manu Chao, Albarn is a mercurial synthesist who weaves together bits of rock, pop, and reggae without condescending to any of them. This spring, the ...