"Got some bad news this mornin,'" Cee-Lo Green sings, "which in turn made my day." The about-face in this symmetrical couplet, near the start of Gnarls Barkley's second album, is entirely in character. Like his partner, the producer Danger Mouse, Cee-Lo has a special place in his heart for the counterintuitive: miserable exuberance, sweeping miniatures, songs that sound both chipper and haunted.
It's doubly fitting, then, that this album is called The Odd Couple, though in truth the same yin-and-yang formula held St Elsewhere, the first Gnarls Barkley album, together. (Scour it anew, and you'll find just as many natural opposites held in a curious balance.) As before, Cee-Lo plays the manic creative type, and Danger Mouse the closeted obsessive. Anguish and perturbation are their most fertile areas of overlap.
If this all seems a bit affected and arty for a pop album, well, so does the album. Packed with arid, minor-key cinematic flourishes - the film composer Ennio Morricone should get some sort of intellectual-property credit - it hovers between a timeless form of nostalgia and a timely strain of paranoia. There's no single on the order of Crazy, the group's breakout smash; Run, the closest thing, is pure adrenaline. "Run for your life!" Cee-Lo stridently urges in the chorus, without specifying where, or from what.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Strangely, given the unified palette and temperament, the album feels disjointed: One track doesn't pull you to the next. (Often the songs fade or fizzle out.) This may be part of the push-pull strategy, but that's not the impression given, and you can only wonder what Danger Mouse had in mind. It's a bigger mystery than the one behind Cee-Lo's more grating tracks (Neighbors, Open Book), which suggest unregulated spasms of ego.
There are some examples of deft and seamless partnership here, like the flute-garnished chill-out track She Knows and the new wave-inflected Going On. But then comes a ponderous glimpse into the mind of a sociopath, or a theatrical gesture of self-scrutiny. Only the closing song, A Little Better, offers a confession that feels true enough to savor.
"Oh, it's probably plain to see/That I've got a whole lot of pain in me/And it will always remain in me," Cee-Lo broods darkly, recalling a story suggestive of his tough upbringing in Georgia. But of course there's a twist. "The circumstances put soul in me," he adds, with a melodic upturn at the word "soul." And when the chorus comes, with its nifty bass arpeggio and modest refrain ("I feel a little better"), the clouds seem to part, for just a moment.
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It's the most graceful moment on The Odd Couple, partly because it feels so uncalculating. Of course its power might also lie in its transience. What would happen, after all, if Gnarls Barkley were to wake up to some good news? Obviously the day would be ruined.
"I don't know how to begin," Norah Jones sings softly in The Story, her contribution to the soundtrack of Wong Kar-wai's (王家衛) first English-language film, My Blueberry Nights. She sounds credibly unsure, though the song's musical setting - cowpoke bass line, pianistic rustle, brushwork on a snare - so clearly reflects her natural mode. The Story could have fit on one of Jones' Blue Note albums if it didn't have a purpose to serve on this one.
Here it functions as an overture and chief attraction, as the soundtrack's only brand-new, noninstrumental tune. Its mood carries over into the original score, by Ry Cooder; his three guitar-focused miniatures may involve some reverb, but they hew to the same rustic, searching feeling. The same is true of a couple of fine vintage soul songs, by Otis Redding and Ruth Brown, and one strong retro-soul effort, by Mavis Staples.
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Wong has described My Blueberry Nights as an American road movie with romance and renewal at its core, but he also intended it as a vehicle for Jones, who makes her acting debut in the lead role. A number of the songs on the soundtrack, including two recent tunes by Cat Power, were played on the set during filming, to set the mood among cast and crew. (Cat Power makes her big-screen debut in the film as well.)
Because Wong produced the soundtrack with Eli Wolf, the senior director of A&R at Blue Note, it's no surprise that there's room for two of Jones' label mates, Amos Lee and Cassandra Wilson. Here the lines get intentionally blurred: Lee is a contemporary of Jones, and Wilson is in some sense her touchstone.
In his liner notes to the album, Wong recalls playing Wilson's version of the Neil Young ballad Harvest Moon - from her 1996 Blue Note album New Moon Daughter - during a scene that required Jones to cry on cue. "I'm not sure what this song means to Norah," Wong writes, "but take after take it brought on tears."
Consolers of the Lonely, the Raconteurs' boisterous second album, arrives virtually fresh from the studio. Jack White (from the White Stripes) and Brendan Benson, the band's songwriters and singers, with Jack Lawrence on bass and Patrick Keeler on drums (the rhythm section from the Greenhornes), finished the album the first week of last month.
Like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, the Raconteurs attempted a near-stealth release, quietly announcing that the album would be available without further advance promotion. "We wanted to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the exact same time," the band said last month, "so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding it's availability, reception or perception."
But Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails released digital versions before physical ones, directly through their own Web sites. The Raconteurs, using retailers, lost control. The iTunes Music Store, which now claims to be the second largest nationwide music retailer, mistakenly made downloads available early. Meanwhile CDs shipped to stores have apparently been copied in high quality and uploaded. The album has been leaked across the Internet for days.
A plan catapulted toward chaos - aesthetically, that fits the Raconteurs' music. The songs are tautly constructed; some, like Rich Kid Blues, These Stones Will Shout and Consoler of the Lonely, leap suddenly from riff to riff. And there's nothing sloppy about the band, which keeps dynamics and details in mind even when it's bashing away.
Yet the Raconteurs sound as if they could go off the rails at any second. The vocals verge on mania, the guitars and keyboards thrive on distortion, and White whoops and hollers through many of the tracks.
He and Benson have all but set aside the conundrums they sang about on the Raconteurs' debut album. The new songs are about lovers' breakups and other agitated mental states: insecurity (Salute Your Solution), imprisonment (Hold Up), obsession (Attention) and show business (Five on the Five, with White wailing, "I look nothing like the kids in the videos.").
The Raconteurs have plunged fully into their chosen era of vintage rock, 1965-75, sounding less self-consciously retro than they did on their debut. While they gleefully sock out garage-rock riffs, they also allude to Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, even the Beatles for patches of harmony in You Don't Understand Me. They get down-home and bluesy, with slide guitar and banjo, in Top Yourself. They try something like soul in Many Shades of Black, and they move toward spaghetti-Western rock with horns for a snake-bitten desert fable, The Switch and the Spur.
The Raconteurs are singing, more often than not, about desperate characters. But that desperation only makes the crunch of the music more euphoric.
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