The Fall was an underrated album, right? Right? Anybody?

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Crystal Leww: This is spoken word poetry set over beeps. Imagine the nightmare of experiencing this live. 
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Katie Gill: That sure was a song. There’s so much going on here from condemning references about building walls to reassurances that “when the morning comes/we are still human.” There’s so much going on that I don’t think any of it really sticks. The final product isn’t the attacking protest song that the Gorillaz obviously want it to be. Instead, it’s a bit of a muddled mess filled with references, esoteric statements and — wait, what did unicorns have to do with any of this, did they seriously end with a Spongebob clip, I don’t GET this. And look, I know those hooded figures in the video are technically the La Candelaria brotherhood in Spain and not the KKK, but the song’s explicitly anti-Trump and white nationalism’s on the rise; come on Gorillaz, you probably should have picked a different image choice in the first place.
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Alfred Soto: Spoken word poetry has to work on its own terms; when set to music, the backing track should be more than echoes of Bowie’s “Big Brother.” If this Gorillaz track is a hallelujah, then Trump is a good president.
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Iain Mew: Benjamin Clementine’s voice and enunciation, thick with seriousness, is just what is needed to live up to the brooding music and the heavy sentiment of the choir & Albarn sections. He’s a more awkward match for the satirical words of the verses, though. He gives blaming the far east and building walls to protect prosperity an inappropriate calm sincerity, a monster hiding somewhere other than in plain sight. Maybe the contradictory impluses throughout the song contribute to appropriate feelings of sadness and confusion, but we’re only a couple of weeks from its release and the gap formed by its lack of horror is already even more glaring.
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Jonathan Bradley: “Hallelujah Money” starts off curiously, with Benjamin Clementine’s out-of-time croon sounding as if it were contributed by a restless neophyte experimenting with his first sampler. It carries on that way too: not actually as frivolous as Damon Albarn’s Trainspotting lark “Closet Romantic” — in its dreamiest moments, it evokes some of the woollier soundscapes on Think Tank — but as Clementine’s verse carries into a bridge contributed by a ghostly and less otherworldly Albarn, and then a quite silly spoken word section that finishes in the tones of Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood, it becomes clear there’s far more experimentation at work than direction.
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Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: The greatest attribute of the Gorillaz concept is their musical malleability — being a cartoon-band with a shadow ensemble of collaborators makes them get away with pretty much any stylistic direction they take — but this time they just cannot escape from Benjamin Clementine’s tremendous magnetism and spellbinding vibrato. “Hallelujah Money”‘s entire appeal is based upon his fantastic vocal, not the political content, so let’s not list this as an Anti-Trump anthem. There already is one, and it’s the only one we need.
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Mark Sinker: If you’d said “a quietly angry satire on the Prosperity Gospel (and also Trumpian anti-migrant rhetoric), except delivered as an Albarn side-project,” I’d have passed, probably super-quickly, even though I’ve often liked Gorillaz’s torpid trip-lope. But somehow there’s something dotty and even empathically unforced about Clementine’s deep posh warble that you can enjoy being niggled by.
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Micha Cavaseno: Preachers talking of damnation usually warn of our downfall in the hopes that we’ll listen and remember to do good. By that same right, when we’re being told of how blessed we actually are, it’s meant to distract us from the bad that will always befall us. There is no such thing as a life without strife, stress, difficulty, trial or any idyll. “Hallelujah Money,” even for someone who lacks the will to entrust oneself to a power they can’t believe in, is insufferable in its childishness. Clementine or Albarn, whomever the glove is upon, are choosing in times of great crisis to jab and jeer at people in fear. This isn’t funeral, seance or plea for a miracle. These grave histrionics to laugh at the absurdity of what’s gotten us into this situation is the most petulant bitterness and maybe Gorillaz have served as a great vehicle for commentary beneath cartoon capers, but maybe the world could stand someone clowning and admonishing the world behind masks.
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