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"