Review #20: Gnarls Barkley

Gnarls Barkley-St. Elsewhere
(Atlantic)
6 out of 10

Pic links to Gnarls' website. (High bandwidth & Flash vigorously required.)

Dangermouse is obviously a masterful producer. Having production credit for Gorillaz’ Demon Days, Dangerdoom’s The Mouse And The Mask, and, of course, The Grey Album all on one resume would be cause for the gods to hire the man to provide the (super funkay!) soundtrack to the apocalypse. He’s been incredibly talented in this way since the get go, but it seems that a new talent he’s picked up is the art of outlandish bar-raising. Vegas had the over/under on the number of demographics his new project, Gnarls Barkley, would reach at 2,764.5. The sensible option would be to go with the over. C’mon, with Danger twiddling the knobs for former Goodie Mob crooner-turned-R&B-renaissance-man Cee-Lo, what else would you expect? The former’s amassed notoriety from the mainstream crowd, cred from the hip-hop community for his skillz, and a place within the hipster niche for his tendency to veer towards outlandish ideas; and the latter pretty much everything from everyone for his breakthrough sophomore effort, Cee-Lo Green Is The Soul Machine. Then the duo goes out to smash UK chart records with the bumping single “Crazy”, the first song ever to hit No.1 across the pond on download sales alone.
Unlike many chart hits around the world, “Crazy” actually earns its mainstream acclaim. Dangermouse’s shockingly minimalist collage of howling choral voices, a bold, double bass backbone, and subtle precussion matches wonderfully with Cee-Lo’s freeform oh-no-you-di-int finger wagging straight out of a Motown bleeding-heart malt- shop slow-jam (and also provides enough inspiration for 4 mis-hyphenated adjective clauses). It’s at home on virtually any FM-radio playlist you can conceive, and it’s even been placed on most of them. It’s easy to say the bar was set as high as it can possibly go right about there.
Luckily, the duo was able to duplicate the slickness and synchronicity of “Crazy” at certain points of their debut, St. Elsewhere. The album’s opener, “Go-Go Gadget Gospel”, is as hyperactive and warped as its title suggests. Cee-Lo liberates his Smokey (Robinson, for those playing along at home) Smurf voice to a beat that sounds a lot like Kanye’s “Touch The Sky” at 20X speed. On “Just A Thought”, harsh cymbals grit their teeth and swipe at your ears with sharp claws as Mr. Green gets his Morrissey on. In a bush-league Madvillianesque affair, Lo raps about the flow of chi in “Feng Shui”. If all these songs were released on an EP, I’m pretty sure the world would be much more than content with Gnarls Barkley on that alone for at least a year. Unfortunately, the duo just had to fill in an album with goofy conceptual hip-hop that goes several steps too far.
What better place to start on this album’s ills than “Gone Daddy Gone”. Yes, Violent Femmes fans, that DM and Cee-Lo attempting to reincarnate the somewhat forgotten pained snarl of Gordon Gano for 2006. OK Gnarls, go ahead and casio up the iconic xylophone of the original, blare some glossy pop-punk guitar over it, infuse the vocals with all the tackiness of a Kidz Bop cover version, and completely forget how much of a glaring error the very idea was in the first place. Constantly name-dropping the Femmes in your press releases is way more than enough. While we’re talking about really bad ideas, how about an incredibly forthwith ditty called “Necromancer” that starts off by recalling Bone Thugz-N-Harmony’s “1st Of Tha Month”. Not much more really needs to be said about that. How about the silky-smooth baritone trip-hop of…”The Boogie Monster”…within which, apparently, the only thing that can save poor Cee-Lo from said beast is “some good, good head.” Stop it. Please. I haven’t met a boogie monster yet that was at all neutralized by the aura of fellatio in the immediate vicinity. Worry not though, good sir, because I’ve heard many are warded off by artistic geniuses compromising their abilities with absurdist gimmickry.
The sum of the efforts of the beatmaster and the troubadour have been perceived by the public as the next big thing; the token prog-hip-hop artist on a high school freshman girl’s pink iPod, or at the very least, a serious player in the pop music scene. Judging by the sometimes-sophomoric schtick on St. Elsewhere, the most brilliant aspect of the Gnarls Barkley experience is most likely not the music; but the elaborate joke the duo has successfully played on the top-40 crowd by exploiting the masses in selling the snot out of this set of mock profundities. I’d like to speak for said crowd with this: “Touché, Gnarls, touché.”

Key Tracks: "Just A Thought", "Crazy", "Go-Go Gadget Gospel"

Review #19: Prefuse 73

Prefuse 73-Security Screenings
(Warp)
8 out of 10

Pic links to Prefuse's website for the Screenings album, however, Warp's site for his Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives album is here, their site where you may find a sampler of tunes from his legendary One Word Extinguisher album here, and an official website for his antics circa the Reads The Books EP is here. Don't worry folks, I did the Google searchin' for ya.

Instrumental hip-hop, as it stands today, is a genre that has several Everest-sized speed bumps ahead of it in its quest to become a commercially viable variety of music. One is the mainstream’s tendency to inherently tie hip-hop with rap. To many (even FYE), those two terms are interchangeable, when the truth is rap is a subsection of hip-hop which includes the lyrical technique many are familiar with. Hip-hop itself is the beats you hear in the background of these raps. Of course, instrumental hip-hop itself is somewhat to blame for this confusion due to its frequent inability to stand alone. Madlib’s bumping vintage breakbeats are nice, but they need the skills of a master rhymecrafter like MF Doom to complete them. RJD2’s solo work sometimes has autonomous abilities, but lately he’s confided in Aceyalone and Blueprint for raps to attempt to make his work more accessible.
Instrumental hip-hop does have one hero, however: Guillermo Scott Herren, whose wacky work as Prefuse 73 is so fiercely situated in its own perplexing league, it’s become a sort of taboo to cast rap verses upon it (as the slight critical backlash upon his previous collab-o-rific album Surrounded By Silence has shown). On his latest album, Security Screenings, he melds the spontaneity of glitch and the unmistakable urban bump of hip-hop together to make a sprawling lump of oddly synchronized noise so perplexing on its own, it might make you forget rap ever existed for a second or two.
A perfect example of this Linux-meets-Lil’ Jon motif is on “With Dirt And Two Texts-Afternoon Version”. It starts like a broken radio, jumping frequencies before diving into a synergy of heavily distorted bass and synth that glitters like the sun’s reflection upon a lake. On “No Origin”, snare drums and cymbals battle in the background while brass instruments frenetically flash as if a Wynton Marsalis track was put on a strobe effect. For “Creating Cyclical Headaches”, Herren mashes together a variety of industrial noises as if setting a synthesizer on fire while colleague Kieran Hebden (better known as Four Tet) utilizes his own synth to create a twinkling, blissfully comatose backdrop to this chaos. All these tracks symbolize the feel of the album: the serene crashing head-on with the spontaneous and unsettling.
As would be apparent with any listener, every song on here is somewhat purposefully disjointed, but if you consider the album as a whole, it’s certainly disconnected to a point since this “mini-album” is supposedly, according to Herren, a transition from Surrounded By Silence to whatever project he’s working with next. With that factor in mind, this album is surprisingly tight, as undertones of post-9/11 paranoia are reinforced by interludes demonstrating doubt, loneliness, and schizophrenia.
Granted, it’s still a long shot, but if there’s any one producer to bring instrumental hip-hop to the forefront and bring weaker crunk beatmasters like Mr. Collipark or Scott Storch to shame, it would probably be Guillermo Scott Herren.

Key Tracks: “With Dirt And Two Texts-Afternoon Version”, “No Origin”, “Matrimoniods…”, “Keeping Up With Your Quota”