By Andrew Ross
Regardless of what the cover says, Laika Come Home is really a Spacemonkeyz album, so don’t pick it up expecting to hear a lot of Gorillaz. Each and every Gorillaz track has been thoroughly remixed. For example, “Sunshine” is the only surviving word from the original track “Clint Eastwood,” now under the name of “A Fistful of Peanuts” in it’s remixed form. The track comes out sounding more like Bob Marley’s “Sun is Shining” than anything by the Gorillaz–not that this is a bad thing. This album could’ve been called “Gorillaz do Jamaica,” there are enough reggae riffs and rimshot fade-outs to make you forget what the songs originally sounded like. Laika Come Home is a great album in it’s own right; it just happens not to sound anything like the Gorillaz.