Miserable Exuberance From a Yin and Yang (original) (raw)

Critics’ Choice: New CDs

March 24, 2008

GNARLS BARKLEY

“The Odd Couple”

(Downtown/Atlantic)

“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.

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.

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.

PANIC AT THE DISCO

“Pretty. Odd.”

(Decaydance/Fueled by Ramen)

“We’re still the same band,” Panic at the Disco announces in “We’re So Starving,” the song that starts its new album, “Pretty. Odd.” Well, not exactly. The band has not only dropped the exclamation point it used to place after Panic, but has also bounced back a few decades for its songwriting and sound.

On its million-selling 2005 debut album, “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out,” Panic was pretty much Fall Out Boy Jr. with fast tempos, punk-charged choruses, acutely self-conscious lyrics and bifurcated song titles (“I Write Sins Not Tragedies”). But Panic at the Disco always loved strings, horns and vocal harmonies more than Fall Out Boy does. On its new album Panic’s fondness for baroquely orchestrated pop has led it back to the fountainhead: the Beatles.

The first single, “Nine in the Afternoon,” flaunts its late-1960s pedigree with horn arrangements and a video clip paying homage to “Magical Mystery Tour.” The fixation on the Beatles and psychedelia continues throughout the album. “Northern Downpour” is obviously modeled on “A Day in the Life,” while “When the Day Met the Night” is “Penny Lane” merged with “Within You Without You.” The lyrics mingle ruined romances, hints of apocalypse “If the world were ending would you kiss me?” Brendon Urie sings in “Do You Know What I’m Seeing?” and neo-psychedelic aphorisms. “Don’t you know that those watermelon smiles just can’t ripen underwater?” offers “Behind the Sea,” which also considers war and God.

“Pretty. Odd.” is a brave change and a wildly elaborate project. “I can’t prove this makes any sense but I sure hope that it does,” Mr. Urie declares in “The Piano Knows Something I Don’t Know.” Nearly every song is packed with vocal harmonies and orchestral flourishes, and Panic at the Disco has obviously studied the Beatles’ melodies as carefully as their arrangements. But for all its craftsmanship, “Pretty. Odd.” comes across as mannered and overbearing, more studied than exuberant, the magnum opus of a talented band charging wholeheartedly down a blind alley. JON PARELES

RICKY SKAGGS & KENTUCKY THUNDER

“Honoring the Fathers of

Bluegrass: Tribute to 1946

and 1947”

(Skaggs Family)

Pop albums rarely get more narrowly focused than “Honoring the Fathers of Bluegrass: Tribute to 1946 and 1947,” by the mandolin virtuoso Ricky Skaggs. As the title implies, it’s a bid at time travel, with coordinates fixed on the postwar years of the first coalescence of bluegrass. Less obviously, it’s a salute to the dynamite band led by Bill Monroe then, featuring Earl Scruggs on banjo and Lester Flatt on guitar.

Because Mr. Skaggs is such a commercially savvy artist he has won an armload of Grammy Awards, and his last record was made in partnership with Bruce Hornsby it’s safe to expect something more than a history lesson. His working band, Kentucky Thunder, brings a supremely polished method to these evocations, sounding old-timey but in no way antique. The clear, precise singing of Mr. Skaggs, along with the high harmonies of his vocal partner, Paul Brewster, suggests a contemporary sheen.

But Mr. Skaggs also brings personal history, having shared, in his child-prodigy days, a stage with Monroe. There’s an unmistakable integrity to his effort here, which draws strictly from the repertory of Monroe’s Grand Ole Opry performances of the period, heeding original tempos and other aspects of style.

Mr. Scruggs, the only living member of that Monroe cohort, even makes a guest appearance. The album may feel a bit like a museum exhibition, but its subject, like its execution, comes across as admirably vivid.

NATE CHINEN

THE RACONTEURS

“Consolers of the Lonely”

(Third Man/Warner

Brothers)

“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 March. It’s due officially tomorrow in both digital and physical forms (CDs and limited-edition vinyl).

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 Monday, “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 Mr. White whoops and hollers through many of the tracks.

He and Mr. 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 Mr. 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.

JON PARELES

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