Broken Bells

At a Danish music festival in 2004 a fascinating chat occurred between Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) and James Mercer of The Shins. On finding out they were fans of each other’s work they arranged to put together some progressive melodies, a plan that came to be some time last year resulting in this, their self-titled debut album ‘Broken Bells’.

For the uninitiated, Danger Mouse is perhaps best known for being one half of Gnarls Barkley, a Grammy award winning producer who more recently has worked with Sparklehorse (and James Mercer) on an as yet disappointingly unreleased project, fused an unobvious marriage of Jay-Z and The Beatles on his own ‘The Grey Album’ and if that’s not enough produced the Black Keys’ latest offering ‘Attack & Release’ which was being laid down by the Akron pair along with Ike Turner. Mercer is best known as the creative force and lead singer of The Shins. In short, this is an extremely exciting pairing on paper and naturally it carries a certain level of expectation.

The album delivers. Mercer’s vocals are a treat (as always) and the duo’s first two singles ‘The High Road’ and ‘Vaporize’ demonstrate an individuality belying their relatively recent pairing. There are richly layered melodies in Broken Bells’ musical trifle: Burton providing the custard rich synthy angle and Mercer’s particular performance the whipped cream top. Naturally it’s laced with something a little spikier and Greg Wallace would take absolute pleasure waxing lyrical over how these flavours give way to a pleasant ‘bite’, for example on later tracks like ‘Citizen’ and the falsetto vocals on ‘The Ghost Inside’.

Delicious. Although does it come at the cost of The Shins?