I've just never really been able to enjoy the Gorillaz. I dunno why.

my favorites are rhinestone eyes, superfast jellyfish, and melancholy hill

i really hate sweepstakes even though its got mos def

I guess Plastic Beach is kinda good. Lou Reed track is awesome and Stylo is good single, but I cant remember anything else about the album yet. Demon Days took me some time to like too so who knows.

Broken Bells was good but nothing special.

the only problem i have with it is theres too many guest singers

there needs to be more of 2d singing

I was totally surprised that Plastic Beach is actually good. Too long, some songs I would take off, but overall is pretty good. I was expecting it to be bad.

One of the fake cartoon interviews from Demon Days has Murdoc saying that Gorillaz is about "dark optimism, whatever that is."

Plastic Beach is really good. Like others have said, not as good as Demon Days, but still damn solid.

plastic beach is great imo

Yeah I see where you are coming from.  This is my least favorite of their albums but I still enjoy it. 

im just saying, this album doesnt sound as good to me as the first gorillaz, mostly because dan the automator is one hell of a producer...and i find this album overall too happy for my tastes and too lyrically shallow

hah! gorillaz obviously means a lot to you ;D

^^ explains the different direction the album takes compared to the others.

Albarn said in an interview, "I'm making this one the most pop record I've ever made in many ways, but with all my experience to try and at least present something that has got depth."[3] He added, "I suppose what I've done with this Gorillaz record is I've tried to connect pop sensibility with ... trying to make people understand the essential melancholy of buying a ready made meal in loads of plastic packaging. People who watch X Factor might have some emotional connection to these things, this detritus that accompanies what seems to be the most important thing in people's eyes, the celebrity voyeurism."[3]
The first time Albarn went to Mali, he was taken to a landfill where he saw people "taking every little bit, a little bit of fabric to the fabric regenerators, or the metal and the cans to the ironsmiths and the aluminium recyclers, and it goes on and by the time you get to the road, they're selling stuff."[3] When Albarn went to a landfill outside of London to record the sound of seagulls for the album, he noticed a juxtaposition between the way the two countries dealt with rubbish.[3] "They've got more snakes... like adders, grass snakes, slow worms, toads, frogs, newts, all kinds of rodents, all kinds of squirrels, a massive amount of squirrels, a massive amount of foxes, and obviously, seagulls. [...] This is part of the new ecology. And for the first time I saw the world in a new way. I've always felt, I'm trying to get across on this new record, the idea that plastic, we see it as being against nature but it's come out of nature. We didn't create plastic, nature created plastic. And just seeing the snakes like living in the warmth of decomposing plastic bags. They like it. It was a strange kind of optimism that I felt... but trying to get that into pop music is a challenge, anyway. But important."[3]
Albarn says the album maintains a lot of the melancholy from Carousel.[3] He worked hard on making his lyrics and melodies clear on the album.[3] "Loads of orchestral stuff" was recorded but only a fraction made it onto the final album.[3]

I just think it fits that the sound would be less group like and of course have a more depressing tone.  Even the Stylo video fits the idea.  2D looks freaked out and depressed for the whole thing.  There is another animated sequence that goes with Stylo showing him getting gassed and kidnapped.  I appreciate the Gorrilaz as a story and the art just as much as the music but thats just my opinion.  The book Rise of the Ogre explains everything that is going on between the albums.

umm, not a good excuse if you ask me