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Gnarls Barkley will release the Who's Gonna Save My Soul EP on Nov. 11, with four different versions of the celebrated song, originally off the duo's most-recent album, The Odd Couple.
On August 11, Atlanta hosted a combo of musicians who are not only reshaping the city's
increasingly diverse music scene, but dismantling
preconceptions of popular music as a whole. Gnarls
Barkley returned home for a sold-out crowd at Variety Playhouse and,
on the eve of her national debut on Bad Boy Records (a extended version
of the Metropolis: Suite I she's been selling independently), Janelle
Monae teed them up.
ral music festival, New American Music Union, in the SouthSide Works area of Pittsburgh. A sold-out crowd of 10,000 was treated to performances from Bob Dylan, The Raconteurs, Gnarls Barkley, The Roots and Spoon, among others, all under the curation of Red Hot Chili Pepper Anthony Kiedis.
Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo aren't often (or ever, really) described as musical minimalists. Apple is more or less the gold standard in simplicity. So when the Gnarls Barkley pair recorded a live five-song EP at the Apple store in SoHo, it could have resulted in almost anything.
[Above: headliners Gnarls Barkley]
Violent Femmes has done unto Gnarls Barkley what Gnarls
Barkley did unto them in covering tune “Gone Daddy Gone” on St.
Elsewhere. In case you haven’t heard yet (in blog years, this story is 42), the Femmes recently officially
released their take on the smash hit “Crazy,” a fitting number for a band that
suffered a member-to-member lawsuit last year over a Wendy’s advertisement.
This summer, it seems any place and any reason are game for a music festival. We've had Memorial Weekend Fest in Bend, Ore., Bang on a Can Marathon (N.Y.) and Israel @ 60 (D.C.) most recently. The Wordless Music Series (N.Y.) will be going on through the end of June, and Corndog-O-Rama (Atlanta) this month as well. We are celebrating things with song like never before, and honestly, it's pretty sweet.
Residents of our nation's capital are in for a treat this June. The homegrown boys of the Thievery Corporation will host their annual mini-fest at the Merriweather Pavilion just outside of the District's limits, and this year's line-up is killer.
In considering the follow-up album from a group with a breakout debut, there is often that natural-but-nagging concern that the first record was a fluke. Gnarls Barkley’s sophomore release, The Odd Couple, cements Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green's collaborative voice. Their re-invention of modern soul once again comes across loud, funky and clear, picking up right where they left off.
St. Elsewhere (2006) introduced us to Gnarls’ unique pairing of Cee Lo’s soulful, penetrating lyrical style and Danger’s psychedelic sound-forging wizardry. The Odd Couple echoes that format, once again transporting the listener to a refreshing universe where the old school meets the computer age, where Al Green intermingles with Portishead. But this description is unfair, as Gnarls is completely unique, and The Odd Couple only tightens that singular sound. Danger showcases his love of vast musical styles, layering in everything from trippy choral arrangements, melancholy pop and spaghetti westerns while Cee-Lo continues to explore lyrical questions of loneliness and mortality, punctuating them with his incredible voice.
Lead-off track “Charity Case” is a perfect example of how these two styles merge to form the haunting, complex World of Gnarls. Energetic percussion and an “ooh ahh” chorus emerge, only to meet a somber offering from Cee-Lo: “How are you? I’m not doing so good.” These honest lines paired with a club-anthem beat encapsulate what Gnarls is all about. Later, Cee-Lo asks, “Who’s gonna save my soul now?” while a moody keyboard and steady beat back him up, seemingly wondering the answer as well. “Run,” the record's first single, follows soon after to pick up the pace, and the dark-but-inviting universe continues to unfold.
The Odd Couple rewards repeated listens, revealing intriguing new sounds each time, from heavenly organs to cartoon noises. The complexity hints that Gnarls Barkley is finished revving up. Now that Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green are off and running, it's up to their wicked creativity to decided where they go.
Part I: Soundtrack for a Superhero
I’m in my Honda Accord, heading to a Los Angeles recording studio to interview the members of Gnarls Barkley about their new CD, The Odd Couple. Unlike Gnarls, my car is not cutting-edge. And thus, I’m hoping to find parking somewhere a few blocks away—then I can walk up to the studio of Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, and neither he nor his Gnarls partner Cee-Lo Green will notice my uncool ride.
I shouldn’t be so worried. In fact, my obsession with Danger and Cee Lo’s opinion of my automobile is antithetical to what Gnarls Barkley is all about. After listening to The Odd Couple earlier this morning, it occurred to me that the duo’s avant-garde pop sensibility challenges other musicians to unlock their own creativity and make truly unique music. And Gnarls Barkley is designed to have this effect on its listeners, too: Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse want us to be ourselves! To celebrate our idiosyncrasies! These dudes don’t care what kind of car I’m driving. I’m an idiot. I’m going inside.
The studio reinforces my hypothesis about perception vs. reality. You’d think it would be a flashy space with three secretaries wearing headsets in a mod waiting room where I’d be forced to sit awkwardly in a hanging-ball chair. Danger’s studio is actually nondescript—not quite dingy, but very worked-in, with computers and keyboards lining the walls. The down-home feel sets me at ease as the guys walk in and introduce themselves.
I’m immediately drawn to how laid back they seem. They give off a regular-guy vibe, even though nothing they create, either independently or as Gnarls Barkley, has any hint of regularity. They also both have an understandable “here-we-go” look on their face, the kind you get when you’re about to embark on a several-month-long publicity tour promoting your latest creation.
Cee-Lo wears a gold satin jacket, black jeans and an inch-thick diamond bracelet over his heavily tattooed arm. Danger Mouse is sporting a vintage grey blazer with a shirt underneath that says “Cassius Clay” in red cursive. I’m distracted by the fact that I could never pull off the blazer-over-shirt look, and by my bubbling excitement to ask not only about The Odd Couple, but also their obvious love of ’60s music and melancholy pop. And of course I’m also curious as to how they maintained any sort of artistic vision after birthing the monster that was their ubiquitous smash, “Crazy.” But instead of getting to any of that, I spend the first two minutes rambling about the following idea:
“I think The Odd Couple is the soundtrack for a tortured superhero.” They look at me and nod politely. For reasons still unknown to me, I continue: “Yeah, when I heard the album this morning, I felt like I was listening to a story about a very lonely superhero who raced from planet to planet looking for someone to love. At one point, I even saw myself as the superhero, and I was floating underwater looking up at the moon through the water, and I was feeling overwhelmed by the pressure of being who I was destined to be and the sadness that no-one could help me with that.”
Cee-Lo flashes a big smile, and Danger Mouse says, “That’s why we don’t like telling people what these records are about.”
It turns out that this is one of Gnarls Barkley’s main goals: to create a mysterious new sound that allows for individual interpretation. They accomplished this with their first album, St. Elsewhere, which crossed all boundaries by sampling Gianfranco Reverberi, covering the Violent Femmes and unleashing a pop masterpiece that could be heard everywhere from here to Estonia. Literally. It was #1 in Estonia. Number üks with a bülletään!
The Odd Couple is a continuation of St. Elsewhere’s sound. “We weren’t trying to depart from what we’d done because what we had done was so fractured and different from itself anyway,” Danger says. “If anything, we just wanted to do better. We felt like we could do better musically.”
And they did. The Odd Couple goes deeper than St. Elsewhere, creating a visual soundscape. It’s as vivid as if Gnarls shot a movie and put it on CD. Both albums strive for this effect, even beginning and ending with the sound of a filmstrip starting and stopping. And while this framework enhances the music’s cinematic feel, it’s really the depth and colors of the music that provide the imagery. Cee-Lo’s lyrics are more personal than before, without being clichéd. Danger Mouse again showcases his love of spaghetti Westerns, but his music is more brooding this time. St. Elsewhere offers a glimspe of Gnarls’ world, but The Odd Couple sets you on a journey—in my case, an underwater superhero fantasy I shared in embarrassing detail with both members of Gnarls Barkley.
Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse went about creating the songs on The Odd Couple in the same manner as St. Elsewhere. Danger laid down a bunch of demos and sent them to Cee-Lo, who wrote lyrics to certain tracks if he felt emotionally drawn to them. I can see how some people (myself included) would think Danger Mouse is the puppet master pulling Gnarls Barkley’s strings, simply because he’s choosing the source material. But Danger Mouse goes out of his way to make sure Cee-Lo gets credit as a collaborator. “Everything that was there, everything that you hear, was something that he decided to take and work on lyrically,” he says. “In the same way that I’d try to lead him with the music, he’s led the direction of this album by picking the songs that he did.”
Their complimentary nature is remarkable. Here’s an exchange they had after we talked about the popularity of “Crazy”:
Cee-Lo: “Every now and then, I can’t help but feel like I coulda sang that song better.”
Danger Mouse: “And I’m thinking, ‘I’m lucky as hell he sang that song over that track.’”
Cee-Lo: “I’m lucky that that track made me like that song.”
I mean, maybe I’ve lived too long in L.A., where you can only wear a “save the whales” T-shirt if you’re being ironic, but it’s refreshing to see two musical powerhouses who not only enjoy making music together, but also actually like each other as people. At one point while we’re at the studio, Danger Mouse gets up and grabs Cee-Lo a VitaminWater—just because. Maybe if Lars Ulrich had gone out of his way to fetch James Hetfield a bottle of Aquafina in the middle of an interview, Some Kind of Monster would’ve never been made.
Part II: Baby Hulk
Not to dwell on the superhero theme, but Cee-Lo reveals that, as a child on his neighborhood football team, he was known as Baby Hulk. “I was a young, powerful menace,” he says.
The Hulk didn’t wear a gold jacket or a diamond bracelet, but with Cee-Lo’s stocky build, you can see how the soulful singer earned his nickname. Danger Mouse, on the other hand, is tall, reedy and bearded. He says their physical appearances—as well as their personalities (“the yin to each other’s yang”)—inspired The Odd Couple’s title.
The album’s concept yields other interpretations, as well. “It’s the marriage of musicality and melody,” Cee-Lo says. “The odd pairing of something sung soul over something folky.”
And then, of course, there’s the idea that Gnarls Barkley, with its extremely vivid sound, likes to name its albums after visual media. Both The Odd Couple and St. Elsewhere were TV shows (although I don’t know why you’d name a revolutionary neo-soul album after a medical drama starring Howie Mandel).
Yet for me, The Odd Couple really refers to the band’s place in the pop music world—one half of the couple is Gnarls Barkley and the other half is the rest of what’s out there. There’s Gnarls, and then there’s everybody else.
And in this interpretation, maybe it’s not so absurd to imagine Gnarls Barkley as—wait for it—a superhero, soaring from galaxy to galaxy, searching for both inspiration and people who want to be inspired.
The duo’s strength lies largely in its ability to bend time, traveling back and forth between the trippy 1960s and the computer-dominated modern world. Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse don’t exactly exploit the friction between the eras. Rather, they find surprising ways to integrate the two. Danger, for instance, samples choral passages along the lines of the Mamas & the Papas or Free Design—groups that lived in a liberated era, yet carried a certain melancholy in their harmonies. Gnarls also borrows heavily from the funky ’70s. While the musicians claim not to have discussed musical influences while making the record, they both adore Sly and the Family Stone. Apparently Cee-Lo fell in love with a coveted Sly bootleg Danger picked up while touring Japan, leading Danger to get his partner a deluxe box set of Sly’s complete works for Christmas—VitaminWater redux. Cee-Lo’s vocal power (“he’s got some range,” Danger brags) evokes the rawness of the Funkadelic era while channeling everyone from Al Green to Nina Simone. Danger’s cut-and-paste production echoes Odelay and Paul’s Boutique. Add all of this up and underpin it with a heavy bassline, and you’ve got a unique new-school/old-school pastiche, a sophisticated pop collage that’s accessible enough to resonate around the world.
Part III: “You can't be mad at ‘Crazy’”
“Crazy” is to Gnarls Barkley what “Creep” was to Radiohead or “Loser” was to Beck—and not just because they’re all self-deprecating tunes with one-word titles. They’re also great songs created by artistic visionaries who happened to be embraced by the public. With this in mind, I ask about the influence “Crazy” had on the new album. Danger Mouse is quick to say that, while it was difficult at first, he thinks it helped them: “I think we went out there a little bit more so. There was no attempt to do what ‘Crazy’ did.”
“It is pretty amazing. It’s awesome—‘awe’ being the root word,” Cee-Lo says. “It’s got a Guinness World Record for, what is it? Oh, most radio formats.”
“Crazy” was also the first song in the U.K. to be #1 via downloads, and it won a Grammy. “Crazy” was even covered at my wedding reception last year. The song had enough crossover appeal to get my in-laws’ friends from New Jersey to put down their gin and tonics and shake their collective booty on the dance floor. And then there was that whole #1 in Estonia thing.
As much as Gnarls Barkley didn’t set out to make this crossover smash, Danger Mouse is definitely grateful. “I think that ‘Crazy’ is gonna help people hear this album,” he says. “You can’t be mad at ‘Crazy.’” What Gnarls can get mad at is touring and playing “Crazy” on a seemingly endless journey around the world, which in turn kept them from their studio craftwork. “It just kept on being one more,” Danger Mouse says. “Just one more tour, just one more tour. And then it was two years later.”
“And let’s face it,” Cee Lo adds. “That’s a lot of wear and tear on this beautiful body.”
They re-iterate that their time is much better spent in the studio creating new sounds than being out there sharing the same creations over and over again. If they want to be influential in any way, they have to keep making new music.
“We talk about this a lot recently,” Danger says. “We really feel like we want to have an impact, musically and just on people in general, and to do that, you have to make records and put them out. That’s what people used to do. We look back at like ’67—I always talk about that. It was the first two Doors records, first two Hendrix records, first Pink Floyd record, two Beatles records, two Rolling Stones records—everything. That’s what you do. You go make music. I think for us it’s just as important to maybe play for people and have fun with it, but to get back in there and make some music, and get a lot of our music out there.”
And with that, Gnarls Barkley shows another old-school side of its personality. Here you have one of the most cutting-edge pop groups in the world, and they’re talking about striving to make an impact, to be timeless in a world of disposable media. They achieve this timelessness on The Odd Couple. The first track grabs you and sends you spinning, and each subsequent song lasts for two, three, maybe three-and-a-half minutes tops before ending abruptly. It’s as if Gnarls Barkley wants to let us know that they’re digging what they’re doing, but they’ve also got to keep moving. And before you know it 40 minutes have gone by, and your journey with The Odd Couple is over, and you’re not a superhero anymore. You’re just you, driving home in your Accord, distressed that you’re no longer racing from planet to planet, but also content with the knowledge that you’ll hear from the odd couple again someday. Their adventures have just begun.
It appears Gnarls Barkley has gone all Raconteurs on us. Three weeks before the original release date of April 8, the duo of Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo have decided to release The Odd Couple starting, well, today.
“They felt the timing was right to just go for it,” said an unnamed spokesman for the band in a press release this morning. “With the shifting seasons, furtive romantic entanglements and fierce college basketball rivalries, the latter half of March can be confusing. People need to be soothed and inspired now.”
Whether this album is capable of “soothing” fans twitterpation this spring, or inspiring final four basketball teams to glory could not be confirmed by the press release. But, hey, it couldn’t hurt.
The first single, “Run,” has already made it to number 36 on Billboard’s modern rock chart.
“I know we’re always so modest, but let me toot my own horn,” Cee-Lo told XFM, as quoted on NME. “It’s really fucking good. It’s just bigger, badder, bolder and more arena-friendly.”
Look for the album at both physical retailers nationwide as well as online sources. And hey, if you'd like to read more about Gnarls Barkley, we know this guy who wrote this story about the band for some magazine. Read it here, or visit your local newsstand.
Related links:
GnarlsBarkley.com
DangerMouseSite.com
Cee-Lo on MySpace
Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.
It would be difficult to believe that many music lovers out there have not heard of Gnarls Barkley or the insanely catchy and extremely covered song, “Crazy.” Well, the ubiquitous duo is at it again, building up buzz for its forthcoming album The Odd Couple with the release of the video for new single “Run.”
The clip, which premiered on MTV, continues the trend of Gnarls videos with a retro edge. “Run” is sure to be a treat for all those Eighties Babies who see House Party as a guide to how to theme their weekend. More than that, the video claims to be possibly seizure inducing to video watchers in the U.K.*
Fans also have room to rejoice as earlier today as the second single “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul” has been leaked by master musician ?uestlove via YouTube, complete with faux karaoke by The Roots’ drummer.
Don’t forget to check out the April issue to read Paste's cover story on the band.
* Paste in no way condones the use of music videos to induce seizures in the gentle denizens of the United Kingdom.
Related links:
GnarlsBarkley.com
Gnarls Barkley on Myspace
Paste feature: Two Heads Are Better Than One
Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com
Prepare yourself. Ten years from now, when VH1 inevitably rolls out an I Love 2006 show (scheduled between Flavor of Love 35 and Scott Baio is 56 ... and a Jaded Father of Four, natch) a geriatric Hal Sparks will wax poetic about how for a particular moment in time, music was taken hostage by the R&B-space-funk of Gnarls Barkley. Cut to a graying Michael Ian Black belting out "They think I'm crrraaaaazzzzzyyyy!!!!!" while Henry Rollins rhapsodizes on the beauty of Cee-Lo Green and Danger Mouse's collaboration. The future, friends, is truly a scary place.
But don't get too down on the days to come. The Odd Couple, Gnarls Barkley's aptly titled sophomore record, now has a concrete release date, as it will hit stores on April 15. In January, Rolling Stone was given a sneak peak of a couple tracks from the new record, and apparently the group has expanded beyond psychedelic soul and into "sinister ballads," whatever that means. Gnarls' first single, "Run," is now available as a stream, and also via iTunes. Oh, and that pixel-riffic photo above this article? That's the new album cover. No word on another globe-trotting, costume-changing, Bowie-covering tour, but no worries, you're intrepid, headline-hungry Paste news team will keep you updated.
In other Gnarly news, not to be upstaged by his Mouse companion, Cee-Lo has joined a list that includes Q-Tip, Lil Wayne and Boards of Canada to work on Solange Knowles' (sister of Beyoncé) debut album.
Related links:
Gnarls Barkley on MySpace
iTunes “Run” single
Paste: Review of St. Elsewhere
Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.
Above: Gnarls in Charge
Brian Joseph Burton, aka Danger Mouse, has the new Gnarls Barkley album on his iPod. But since petty theft is generally discouraged, Billboard settled for a listen of a song-that-will-not-be-named from an album-that-will-not-be-named.
Described as “an even deeper slice of soul” than anything from the group's 2006 debut St. Elsewhere, the preview song was outfitted with an acoustic melody that stepped back for Cee-Lo’s forceful vocal performance. Burton declined to name or even talk about the track.
But he did spill a little about their recording process.
“No song is ever done until we have all the material together,” Burton told Billboard. “When we have enough songs to the point where we have an album’s worth, then we’ll go in and start finishing them together, so they have a cohesiveness to them, and we know where they fit with each other.”
Gnarls Barkley, a duo shrouded in as much (if not more) mystery as the White Stripes, is being tightlipped about the new album on label Downtown/Atlantic. Having donned Star Wars and nautical get-up in the past, we have to wonder what’s next: Harry Potter? Transformers? Scott Baio circa 1985?
All we know is that the album exists, and that it’s anywhere from "two weeks to two months" from completion, says Burton.
Related links:
GnarlsBarkley.com
Gnarls Barkley on MySpace
Paste Review of St. Elsewhere
Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.
[Above: Cee-Lo of Gnarls Barkley]
Miami has become quite mad for massive outdoor music festivals. Between the homegrown Ultra (now in its ninth year) which will officially close the 2007 Winter Music Conference, and the imported Global Gathering, which is like a tropical, mini Leeds, the town sees more than its fair share of aural largesse. Seems only fitting since Miami's built upon a boast and a bullet.
Which brings about Bang.
Now in its second year, Bang Music Festival proved to be what Miami is at its core – perhaps America’s most vocally polyglot metropolis. From the frenzy of Tiesto and his ilk to the Last Poetic legacies of Common, the rambunctious rock of Modest Mouse to the family rites of Damien “Jr. Gong” Marley, and the crazed, border-leanings of Kinky through the amazing-their-still-standing gamesmanship of Duran Duran, Bang did what we here do best: It shot off its big mouth.
But it was with the new one world reorderings of Thievery Corporation and Gnarls Barkley where the polyglot really got loud, and where Bang really bucked.
Thievery Corporation, as many now well know, is our nation in a new world nutshell. A globeful of mixed-use grabbings put into play for all to keep and to move to. Corporation kingpins Rob Garza and Eric Hilton long-ago ditched the chill-out in favor of some crushed velvet post-groove. And stagings at such spreads as Lollapalooza, Camp Bisco, Austin City Limits and the Virgin Festival have given them a reach well beyond their fabled 18th Street Lounge. At Bang, the Thieves were exceptionally no exception.
This is how the world turns.
Gnarls Barkley, on the other hand, turns the world on. Tricked-out, pimped-out and slick, like a blaxploitation flick come to 21st century true life, Gnarls came plastered in suits, spangles, sparkles, smoke and – above all – soul. Gnarls brings the kind of Hot Buttered stir Sir Isaac Hayes’ halcyon days only dared to forecast.
It was a collision of sound that continued further, faster, louder and in a whole different direction of more spectacular with the neo-futuristic now of Daft Punk, the French robotic duo that covers all the colors in the spectrum of sound, and then adds some sucker punch for fun. Backed by a barrage of Holzer-like LEDs, draped in a Masonic configuration of hyperlit pyramids and hidden beneath their trademark alien space helmets, these Punks showed you don’t have to show face to get to transcendent; you must simply just be transcendent, preferably with volume.
Indeed, if Bang were a lesson in a bottle, it would be this: It is time we speak up. Loudly.
Gnarls Barkley has announced the upcoming limited edition re-release of its debut, St. Elsewhere , tomorrow, Nov. 7. The CD/DVD package compiles the album, exclusive extras and bonus features. It will also come with a 92-page booklet featuring artwork and a special flip book. The St. Elsewhere DVD collects four of Gnarls’ music videos, including “Crazy” and “Gone Daddy Gone.”
Gnarls recently announced plans to accompany Red Hot Chili Peppers on the next leg of their U.S. tour, as well as a co-headline show alongside Flaming Lips on Dec. 30 in San Francisco.
In any other context, the vision of Cee-Lo at the helm of a sold-out venue full of screaming girls would be, let’s face it, something of an anomaly. Yet such is the beauty of a internet-fueled economy where a knob-tweaker like Danger Mouse and a singer/rapper better known in hip hop circles than most teenager’s ipods can come together and crack the scene wide open with a concept like Gnarls Barkley. The trouble with an international hit like "Crazy," their thumping anthem to suicidal psychosis, is that fame has escalated beats and good fun into a marketing mania. Gnarls Barkley is almost too well known for its thematic costuming, its dual-star line-up, and the hype constructed around its fictional namesake personality. The cynic in me quietly worried that I was about to be subjected to something that was more kitsch than content, more DAT than dope. How would Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse turn their 30 minute Technicolor trip hop romp, St. Elsewhere, into a viable set of songs?
The answer, apparent the minute the band came out dressed in its signature hospital- themed OR scrubs and nurse outfits, turned out to be sheer physical volume. Danger Mouse, aka Brian Burton, had employed a veritable performing army that fanned out across the stage: three back-up singers, the required “backbone” of drummer, bassist, keyboardist, guitarist, and an electric string quartet. Throw in the mighty Mouse himself, and the songs became a blast of stereophonic rainbow, each presented as slightly looser jams of the recorded originals: the jangly Motown beats of "Smiley Faces," their cover of "Gone Daddy Gone," and the sexy swamp rock of "The Boogie Monster," a song that Lux Interior would be proud to cover.
Not to say that there weren’t noticeable differences, too. Take "Feng Shui," a breezy rap where Cee-Lo pontificates on the perfection of his furniture, the beauty of his physical movements, and of course, the fact that his rhyming fu is the greatest. Onstage it was pulled out of its pretty lacquered box to become a weed-fueled guitar laden head-trip. The maniacal robotic frenzy of "Transformer" was also revamped, slowed down into an almost acoustic reverie of hissing breakbeats and garnished with swooning background vocals.
All of these elaborate musical gymnastics would have been nothing without Cee-Lo, whose vocal presence galvanized everything around it into that elusive, ever heralded fictional being that bears their name. There is a searing quality to his falsetto; a heat that welds a tune like "Crazy" into the full-blown acid operetta that it becomes live. The son of two preachers, Cee-Lo never hesitated to invoke the loftier cadences of gospel at right moments, yet also knew when to back down off the pulpit and give up some bouncy R&B, as was the case with their surprising cover of Holly Golightly’s “There’s an End,” (itself in turn a cover, as the original was penned by the Greenhornes).
Lest the crowd confuse him for a man of the cloth, however, the singer’s crowd banter was peppered with sly, half-joking entreaties for the ladies to shed clothing and display their finer physical attributes. It wasn’t clear if there were any takers on that offer in that packed house, but it wasn’t exactly necessary either with the outfits onstage. After all, if there is something sexier than a tall blonde “nurse” straddling an electric cello, I’d love to hear about it. Indeed, Gnarls Barkley offered up a cinematic blend of spark, sex, and samples, with the only complaint, (heard frequently upon the slow painful exit from the crowded venue), being that it was far too short of a set, even with covers. Of all the things a crowd could want from a band, however, “more” is obviously the most desirable of answers.
Two nutty originals imagine the recording studio as playground
The online buzz regarding this collaboration between rapper/singer/Goodie Mob cofounder Cee-Lo and DJ/producer Danger Mouse (best known for his Jay-Z/Beatles mash-up The Grey Album) stretches back to late fall 2005, when a song called “Crazy” leaked months before word of an official release. Made available in early April as a download-only single, “Crazy” quickly became the first release of its kind to hit #1 in the U.K., and is the strongest track on St. Elsewhere, though not by much. It’s a difficult album to peg, moving between different tones, eras and styles. Cee-Lo barely raps, showcasing instead his deceptively powerful Al Green-channeling vocal wail. Classic soul is frequently referenced, but St. Elsewhere also makes room for a straight reading of The Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone,” a goofy stab at a horror novelty tune (“The Boogie Monster”) and a bit of warped zydeco (“Go-Go Gadget Gospel”). It’s all over the place in the best possible way.
Contests.
Mindy Smith - "My Holiday"
Punisher: War Zone
