2008 Music Recap, Days 6 and 7: Danger Mouse edition
Click to viewI expected paranoia from Gnarls Barkley. But Beck? Mr. "Chainsmoke Kansas flashdance ass pants?" That's surprising. If only Modern Guilt was as interesting as the dread it expresses.
Gnarls' The Odd Couple is a satisfying sequel to St. Elsewhere, even if it just sticks to a basic formula where:
1) Cee-Lo acts crazy
2) Danger Mouse digs through big musical toybox, picks out the most fun toys
Shit gets heavy throughout the record, and a lot of the tracks just don't go anywhere, which makes the propulsive lead single "Run (I'm A Natural Disaster)" stand out even furhter. To my ears, "Run" is a celebratory track, even with Cee-Lo's insistent pleading that the children get to running. It might not be clear what they're running from, but I love that-there's no anticlimactic reveal like in St. Elsewhere's "The Boogie Monster."
Another St. Elsewhere correlation: like that record's "Smiley Faces," "Run" gets shot across the finish line by a fantastic bridge. There's also a touch of "Smiley Faces" in "Gamma Ray," what with both tracks being driven by the clunky low end that's become a staple of Danger-Mouse-as-rock-producer (see also: The Rapture's "Pieces Of The People We Love"). The claustrophobia of "Gamma Ray" is typical of Modern Guilt's greyscale psychedelia, but it's another song whose tempo singles it out from the rest of the tracklist. That's not to say that faster=better (though I was all about uptempo songs this year), but Modern Guilt is kind of a slog.