This year marks 10 years since the grand folly of Blur's The Great Escape - that over-hyped, overwrought follow-up to Parklife that showed a band buckling under their own caricature. In hindsight, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to Blur - and especially to lead singer Damon Albarn, who has been concentrating on extraordinary musical expansion ever since.

Demon Days is the zenith of Albarn's forays into Mali music and fatherhood - a relentless slide show of electro, funk, breakbeat, rock, gospel and The Beach Boys. It's also bulging with melodies

that snake up through the industrial beats and rhythms, like weeds growing out of concrete paving.

Gorillaz enables Albarn, along with artist Jamie Hewlett and producer Danger Mouse, to take caricature to the extreme by presenting themselves as cartoon characters - therefore dispensing with celebrity baggage and giving themselves free rein to cross musical borders.

One of the few examples where the sideshow is bigger than the main stage, 2001's debut was patchy compared with Demon Days - the latter being an album for these spiritually testing times.

Albarn is clearly disturbed by the world into which he's brought a daughter, and the music - especially in terms of the single Feel Good Inc and Kids with Guns (which comes with the refrain 'They're turning us into Monsters!') - paints it black.

Dare is a wonderful slab of haunting electro complete with Shaun Ryder and Neneh Cherry, who give way to Dennis Hopper on the following track.

A huge achievement and, for Albarn, a career-defining work that eclipses Parklife.