Tag: Danger Mouse

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Best albums of 2010: #2 Broken Bells “Broken Bells”

Broken Bells is a collaborative project between The Shins’ frontman James Mercer and über-producer/musician, Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse). I first came across Burton’s work care of his production efforts on the second Gorillaz long player, but I really stood up and took notice when he recorded an album with Cee Lo Green under the moniker Gnarls Barkley. Of course, I was already late to party at that point. Danger Mouse had already snagged the listening public’s attention a few years earlier with “The Grey album”, his infamous mashup of the obvious classic albums by Jay-Z and The Beatles. After the success of Gnarls Barkley, Burton was called in to produce albums by The Black Keys, Norah Jones, The Good, The Bad & The Queen, and Beck. For a while there, it seemed that everything he touched turned to gold, including this album with James Mercer as Broken Bells.

In the case of Mercer and his band The Shins, on the other hand, I picked up on them very early on, well before they received the plug by Natalie Portman’s character in the film, “Garden state”, though, I wasn’t so sure I agreed with her bold proclamation at the time. I never saw their music as life-changing but I definitely enjoyed it. Interestingly, I became a bigger fan of The Shins after listening to Broken Bells. It was as if his collaboration with Brian Burton opened my eyes to Mercer’s talents as a songwriter. Another golden win for Burton, I guess.

Indeed, I took to “Broken Bells” immediately, much like I did with The Postal Service’s 2003 classic, “Give up”, an album to which I’ve often compared this one. It bears the same mélange of organic and electronic sounds but where that album pushed boldly forward into futuristic space, “Broken Bells” felt more retro. Yes, there are nods towards science fiction but it isn’t the future we envision today, rather, it’s the present day that we imagined in the past. On many of the songs, Burton and Mercer seem to encapsulate the listener on a silver screen era rocket ship, jettison all of the technical laws of space travel since discovered, and return us to the romance of the thing.

This is the way of the entire album. It sounded like no other music being made in 2010, yet each song sounded instantly familiar, like you grew up listening to Broken Bells’ remixes of the music to which your parents’ parents listened. It is ten tracks of utter brilliance and yes, romance, employing all the cannons in their symphonic arsenal, reinventing the songs and their structures at a whim, a well-placed horn blast here and a shock of string flourish there, like the musical equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting that shouldn’t work but does. You listen to it and find your way to the end of the album, not knowing how you got there, not really knowing anything except that you want to restart it all over again.

In case you haven’t listened to the whole thing already, here are my three picks for you off the album worth listening to right now.

“The ghost inside”: We start things off four tracks in. “Just like a whiskey bottle, drained on the floor. She got no future, just a life to endure.” The heavy lyrical themes of isolation and haunted introspection are subverted by falsetto vocals, handclaps, humming bass lines, haunting melodic synths, it all sounds so dark and disco, you just need to add smoke machine and the words fade away.

“Vaporize”: Track two starts off sounding like it could be an early Shins track, all Mercer and acoustic strumming, until the vibrating organs and that dirty, hammer-down rhythm kicks in and the speakers low end blow out like beautiful confetti. The words, though, remain thoroughly Mercer. “What amounts to a dream anymore? A crude device, a veil on our eyes.” The ideas dance and dare, play upon depth and angle slyly within the melody, unique and happily hummable.

“The high road”: My very favourite song from 2010 starts with pixelated frequencies that melt into a sliding mellow groove complete with jiving handclaps and there’s that wicked singalong bridge that leads you out of the wilderness. “The high road is hard to find, a detour in your new life. Tell all of your friends goodbye.” This is the opening track on the album and does a great job setting the stage for the tracks to follow. I’ve written before that this is hipster funk for martians but I don’t think this precludes us mere mortals from getting on the bus.

Stay tuned for album #1. In the meantime, here are the previous albums in this list:

10. Diamond Rings “Special affections”
9. Bedouin Soundclash “Light the horizon”
8. LCD Soundsystem “This is happening”
7. The Drums “The Drums”
6. The New Pornographers “Together”
5. Stars “The five ghosts”
4. The Radio Dept. “Clinging to a scheme”
3. The National “High violet”

You can also check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.

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Tunes

100 best covers: #60 Gnarls Barkley “Gone daddy gone”

<< #61    |    #59 >>

I’m sure that all of you recall a little ditty called “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley. I distinctly remember seeing the video for it for the first time late one Friday night in 2006 on The Wedge and being drawn in and mesmerized by the Rorschach style ink blots that formed and re-formed images of the performers and such. And man, was that song catchy. I immediately went on the hunt for the album on which it appeared, “St. Elsewhere”, and learned that Gnarls Barkley was the duo of R&B wonder vocalist CeeLo Green and Midas touch uberproducer Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse). Of course, “Crazy” went ubiquitous and intergalactic as a hit but the rest of the album was quite excellent too – a compelling collection of genre-bending and genre-defying tracks – and produced two more singles, the last being the double A-side release of “Who cares?” and this very song, a cover of Violent Femmes’ “Gone daddy gone”*

Now, to close these posts, I typically give my opinion (and solicit your own) on whether I prefer the original or the cover but I am going to get this out of the way right now. Though the cover is quite excellent, I am going with the original here. It appears as track nine on the iconic self-titled debut album by the Milwaukee based trio. It is just over three minutes of punk and folk mashup and with a jazz-type song structure, including not one but two xylophone solos performed by bassist Brian Ritchie. In fact, I love how each performer takes their turn in the solo spotlight in such a short barn-burner and no one misses a beat.

It is amazing though and a testament to the range of music influences that surged through “St. Elsewhere” that CeeLo and Brian chose to cover a lesser known Violent Femmes tune from over thirty years prior and did so, faithfully. The cover is thirty seconds shorter and using digital sounds rather than organic instruments, managed to even speed it up some. It introduced a whole new audience to a great track and like many successful covers, the new audience fell for it, not necessarily even aware of its origins. And man, does that CeeLo have a voice!

Thoughts?

Cover:

The original:

*Interestingly, Violent Femmes’ original is also a cover of sorts, including a complete lyrical verse of Willie Dixon‘s “I just want to make love to you”. Hence, the shared writing credit.

For the rest of the 100 best covers list, click here.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 2010: #1 Broken Bells “The high road”

<< #2

After almost a full year, we’ve finally come to the number one song on this best of 2010 list. So many great songs but this single off the self-titled, debut album by Broken Bells wins it all for me hands down.

I remember first hearing about the Brian Burton and James Mercer collaboration and thinking (whether rightly or wrongly) that this was all made possible by another collaboration six years prior by Jimmy Taborello and Ben Gibbard, called The Postal Service. Still, when I first gave “Broken Bells” a spin and first heard the opening seconds of the opening song, this one, I was hooked. The album then spent a lot of time with me after that, keeping me company with its hooks and multi-faceted magic.

Apparently, the seeds were sown for this collaboration when The Shins’ frontman, James Mercer met producer/musician/wizard, Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse) at a music festival in 2004 and they got to talking and discovered each other’s mutual respect. They didn’t actually get around to working together for another four years and the first album came a couple of years after that. By this time, Burton had already been riding a wave of successes, such as his collaboration with Cee-Lo Green as Gnarls Barkley and the production of albums by Gorillaz, The Good, The Bad and The Queen, Beck, and The Black Keys. Indeed, he was becoming like a musical Midas. Mercer, for his part, had put his own band, The Shins, on hiatus, citing fatigue after three relatively successful albums and achieving a sort of cult status. Working together, the two members of Broken Bells brought their own styles with them to the workshop and seemingly reinvigorated each other, creating beautiful, otherworldly music in the process.

“The high road” is hipster funk for martians. It opens up with synths that feel like free jazz random notes played on an underwater harpsichord, filtered through a C64’s speakers. Then, that laidback beat kicks in and you can just imagine Burton and Mercer coolly walking down a back alley with graffiti on the walls, decked out in bandannas and jean jackets with the collars turned up. Mercer’s vocals here are unlike anything he had previously done with The Shins, which I suppose is the point, affecting a devil may care attitude, almost to the point of irony. The whole thing is so much fun, right down to the backing vocals that invite you in to be part of the gang. That’s right. Step right up and join the choir that is the human race.

Cheers folks and thanks as always for reading.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2010 list, click here.