Somewhere after Demon Days was released, Blur essentially disbanded. So without another outfit, all of Damon Albarn’s creative outlet was directed to Gorillaz.

And that’s where the whole cartoon thing kind of shattered.

And not discretely, either. Live shows featured a video screened before the band came out of the animated group leaving their dressing room only to be stopped to allow for the small army of real people heading the stage–a small army that now included Mos Def, Bobby Womack, and most of the Clash.

This new seriousness is audible in the record itself. While not definitely better than Demon Days, it’s definitely more ambitious. The instrumentation is slicker, guitars replaced by synthesizers and horns on most tracks (perhaps explained by the cartoons depicting Noodle as an android now?). The bass is just as fat, but not as dripping with dub echo.

But the most surprising thing about Plastic Beach is how rarely Albarn holds the spotlight. Demon Days was only without him on four tracks–and one of those was the intro. On Plastic Beach, 2D has a starring role in six of the sixteen songs.

Womack, Mos Def, and the girl from Little Dragon are as prominent voices as Albarn, who isn’t even the first voice we hear on the record–that’d be Snoop Dogg (whose line “they’ll be pop’n lockin’ while I’m rockin’ in the bubble bath” is sheer brilliance, even if it’s more appropriate for his own record than Gorillaz’).

The guests are true collaborators here, writing their own personalities into the record, often ignoring or even contradicting eachother’s message (Snoop doesn’t really seem to care about the whole Lennonesque utopia Kano and Bashy rap about on the next track).

But amazingly, it’s the fractured nature of the album that ties it together. It shouldn’t make sense for Lou Reed and Snoop to appear on the same record, but Albarn’s string pulling orchestrates everything into a single work (Arabic orchestral rap? It works somehow) that is greater than the sum of its parts.

And when the parts here are as wonderful as “On Meloncholy Hill,” “Stylo,” “Empire Ants,” “Rhinestone Eyes,” “Cloud of Unknowing,” etc., that’s no small task.