Good Music / Bad Music

There aren’t really any details at the moment, but the news is refreshing: Danger Mouse (producer if Gorillaz, Beck and Gnarls Barkley among others) and James Mercer (of The Shins) have begun a new project.

Said project is called Broken Bells. Officially, Danger Mouse will be using his real name, Brian Burton, for this project. They already have a website up, too, but it’s not much to look at so far. Bookmark it, though, because I’m sure it will deliver in time.

Burton and Mercer have worked together already on the track, “Insane Lullaby” from the Danger Mouse / Sparklehorse collaboration, Dark Night of the Soul. It’s certainly one of the better tracks from the disc. If that’s any indication, Broken Bells just might be well beyond expectation.

MP3: “Insane Lullaby” by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse with James Mercer

Maybe you have heard and maybe you have not.  The deal with this album is supposedly as follows…

Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse get together with a steady slew of above average vocalists and record an album.  Enter David Lynch providing photography for an accompanying, limited edition, one-hundred page book and DAMN.  This is  going to be  completely bad ass.

All systems ready to go until mega-recording label, EMI, pulls the plug entirely for some undisclosed legal reasons.  How does the ever-innovative Danger Mouse handle this little snafu?  He releases everything but the music – including the CD.  Once released, it will actually be a writable CD-R (and packaging) which will be branded with the label, “For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.”

The idea here is for interested listeners to seek and pirate the music, burning it to the CD-R and circumventing EMI altogether.  This is not a difficult task already, as it’s been leaked through all the standard bit torrent sites.  A minute and a half of looking around, and it should turn up somewhere.  For those not familiar with torrenting, NPR has a stream of the disc, which you can access by clicking here.

All that aside, what of the music?

Well, the touch of Sparklehorse is definitively there.  In the case of Danger Mouse, it’s a bit more ambiguous.  Danger Mouse is a pretty damned expansive artist and producer.  He makes up one half of the cartoony Gnarls Barkley, and has also produced albums for the likes of Gorillaz, Beck
and The Black Keys.  He initially earned his notoriety for The Grey Album, a mash-up of Jay-Z’s The Black Album with The Beatles’ The White Album. All that behind him, his Midas touch on Dark Night of the Soul is there.  It’s just difficult to figure out which specific elements are affected.  This is possibly to his credit, though.  We know a Van Gogh without having to analyze the direction of his brush strokes, right?

The songs all stand alone just fine.  Side by side, however, there seems to be a bigger picture to the thing as sometimes it is difficult to tell that one song has ended and another has begun, but for the change of vocalist.  And how about those vocalists?  The Flaming Lips contribute to the ambient, Phil-Collins-if-Phil-Collins-was-cool(er) opener, “Revenge.”  Frank Black and Iggy Pop lay it down on two of the more rocking tracks (“Angel’s Harp” and “Pain”).  Julian Casablancas of The Strokes chimes in on “Little Girl” and James Mercer of The Shins lends his voice to “Insane Lullaby.”  Suzanne Vega and Vic Chesnutt rise from relative obscurity to sing on “The Man Who Played God” and “Grim Augury.”  Then there is David Lynch, himself, popping up on the eerie title track, as well as “Star Eyes (I Can’t Catch It).”

Musically, it mostly compliments Lynch’s macabre visual style.  There are, however, moments on Dark Night of the Soul, which are anything but dark.  Sometimes these moments last for two or three song stretches.  Sometimes these songs sound so colorful and touch something so intangibly comfortable (despite their lyrical content), that a person might want to shit himself in gleeful abandon.  And yet again, it all works as a rather well arranged whole.

Though it may seem difficult to top Gorillaz Demon Days or anything by Gnarls Barkley, for that matter, Dark Night of the Soul may resonate as Danger Mouse’s finest production yet.  Likewise for Sparklehorse.  It is certainly their deepest.

 
 
The whole disc is freely streaming on NPR’s website. Currently, it’s the only legal way a person can listen to it. Click here to check it out.