Gorillaz – Controllah feat. MC Bin Laden Review

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One of three extra tracks to come from the Cracker Island sessions, Gorillaz are kind and strange enough to save the best pieces until very last. Or at least that is the usual scope of extra tracks. Bits and pieces that did not quite fit the finished product but allegedly too good to cast aside. Recent release Controllah would both fit comfortably on their latest LP and do nothing to stand out from every other track on there. Short and bitter. No change there to the Damon Albarn-featuring piece. Controllah is more of the same basic beat that Gorillaz find themselves padding their tracks with drum-heavy technical duds. Collaborating with MC Bin Laden is frustratingly dull, with laughing interjections presumably aimed at those that bought Cracker Island.  

Gorillaz once again put their faith in collaboration. Brazilian singer Bin Laden lays down a loosely autobiographical track. Smart it may be for Albarn to appeal to the Primavera-going audience whose knowledge of MC Bin Laden will be far wider than the average Gorillaz fan, Controllah does not come across as a genuine collaboration. It bases itself more on the appeal it will have to the hot spots Gorillaz mark on their tours than anything else. Motivated by pleasing crowds in Brazil and Spain, Laden is enlisted by Gorillaz’s ever-marching approach at pocketing some scene or crowd, as they always do. It makes business sense when seeing where Gorillaz are most popular, but the emptiness that strikes through Controllah is fitting for how dull Cracker Island turned out to be. 

Much of the track relies on the fresh and underwhelming presence of MC Bin Laden, one in a million of those Skrillex-collaborating spin-offs that find themselves in the company of desperate artists. Albarn chiming in with empty lyrics of memories and discarding them for the sake of the future is keeping in theme of Cracker Island, an empty vessel and an awkward, dull holiday destination filled with famous faces and up-and-comers. Nobody gets off the island lightly, not least MC Bin Laden. Struck down on Controllah by another routine Albarn experience, where the Blur frontman puts Gorillaz’s banal and childish perspective at the centre of the track rather than round the edges. It works as the latter, but the former comes across as both taking itself seriously and trying to be a light bit of fun. Controllah degenerates into a meaningless, empty littering of “ho-ho-ho, ha, ha”. Not as bad as Albarn’s crushingly poor electronic saturation that comes with “those we leave behind.”

Perhaps Albarn should have left MC Bin Laden and this track behind. Fair it may be to leave it off the album, it does work as a palette cleanser ahead of the title track of Gorillaz’s recent expose of their lack of growth. Sloppy, ineffective and gracefully short, Controllah is at best an interlude and at worst a wasteful collaboration. Gorillaz are getting used to those, though. Cracker Island was full of them and to expect anything more than a gratingly simple experience of questioning “what was in my glass”, as MC Bin Laden puts it, is more on the listener than that of Gorillaz. What appears at first to be an extra offering is more a contractual throwaway, another experience of once-fresh artists dragging down the popular topics of the past year.