There are little satellite towns in the middle of these semi deserts that are absolutely on their knees. Spin ranked Demon Days as the fourth best album of 2005, [56] while Mojo ranked it at number eighteen on their year-end list [57] and hailed the album as a "genre-busting, contemporary pop milestone. The winners were also originally supposed to have their own rooms in Kong Studios, but that never came to pass.

Robert Christgau of The Village Voice gave Demon Days a three-star honourable mention, indicating "an enjoyable effort consumers attuned to its overriding aesthetic or individual vision may well treasure", and selected "All Alone" and "Dare" as highlights. My copy wasn't perfectly flat, but that was most noticeable on the first disc, and it didn't cause any issues. It was released on 11 May 2005 in Japan and 23 May 2005 in the United Kingdom by Parlophone and in the United States by Virgin Records. Released in a gatefold cover (four panel, two pockets) with printed cardboard inner sleeves for each disc.I'm used to receiving records that already come with protective plastics on the discs and here that wasn't the case, so you can imagine I had to wash the records before playing them. I had done stuff before Gorillaz– like the Pelican City stuff– where I worked with musicians, so it wasn't completely foreign to me. Because of one big exclusion: the transitions that connect the tracks are missing, for whatever reason. The track does not appear on the album or D-Sides, however, the track was sampled by Topley-Bird for her song "Soldier Boy", which appears as a B-side for her song "Poison" which features Roots Manuva and features a production credit for Gorillaz.

I thought I was lucky and avoided the skip issues reported here as I got through sides A, B and C without a single skip. Danger Mouse was a longtime fan of Albarn's other band Blur, the feelings of admiration and respect were mutual.The album's opener, "Intro" contains a sample from "Dark Earth", from the soundtrack to the 1978 film Dawn of the Dead. This pressing's sound quality would be passable if it was released by an indie band, but not one of the world's biggest bands.

Mike Schiller of PopMatters wrote that Demon Days "[provides] its listeners not with a story arc, but a "music arc" [which] starts off slow, and honestly, not all that strange", describing the first few tracks as "[sounding] a bit like the Casioed version of a mid- '90s trip-hop album. I can sadly agree that some copies of this pressing have an issue with All Alone on Side C, during the Roots Manuva rap verse. This version also has a silver foil stamp, above the barcode on the back cover, which reads "VMP ESSENTIALS". As on Gorillaz, there are plenty of guest collaborators, including rappers De La Soul, Bootie Brown from the Pharcyde, and MF Doom along with Ike Turner on keyboards, the singer Shaun Ryder from Happy Mondays and the actor and director Dennis Hopper, who narrates a parable ("Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head") about innocence, greed and retribution set to a droll reggae bounce.I had a very up-and-down year [in 2004], but it was definitely a big up when I got a chance to [work with Gorillaz]. Normally I'm iffy about picture discs, but it seems like folks are saying the picture disc surprisingly sounds really good? It's a dark, apocalyptic album that brims with energy and funk, a pop music oxymoron in every fiber of its being. The NME placed the album at number 98 on their list of 100 greatest albums of the decade, [6] and Uncut placed it at number 75 on their list of top 150 albums of the decade.