Gnarls Barkley: The Odd Couple : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

When Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo strike a pose together as Gnarls Barkley, they'll dress up as anything from Star Wars characters to the Dude and Walter from The Big Lebowski. But their greatest costume concept has to be Hunter S. Thompson and his attorney, because that captures the fear and loathing in their music. "Crazy" seemed jovial on the surface, which is why it became the world's favorite song in 2006. But the longer you listened, the creepier it felt — especially Cee-Lo's cackle in the second verse.

The Odd Couple is even doomier — it's like the laugh from "Crazy" stretched out into a whole album of paranoid bad weed vibes. Thanks to Danger Mouse, the album has the always unpredictable sonic brilliance of their first collaboration, St. Elsewhere, even when the songwriting misses the mark. They don't try for any crowd-pleasing pop energy — instead, Danger Mouse filters Cee-Lo's gospel-trained voice through alien studio effects over druggy, distorted funk loops for the kind of sound they called "trip-hop" back in the Nineties. "Charity Case" is Gnarls at their finest, with chain-gang grunts and gasps, tinkling chimes, spy-movie guitar and R&B organ, as Cee-Lo sings, "How are you?/Knock on wood/Well, I'm not doing so good." No kidding.

Former Neutral Milk Hotel protégé Danger Mouse comes up with some amazing tracks here: "Run" sounds like the go-go-bar scene in a vintage biker flick, chopped up into staccato blasts of funk. "Surprise" is Sixties L.A. sunshine pop gone sour, and the Tricky-style ballad "Who's Gonna Save My Soul" lets Cee-Lo wail about drugs and death. The Odd Couple has painfully dull moments ("Blind Mary," "Open Book"), and Cee-Lo whines "Whatever" in what sounds like a lame parody of all the mediocre indie bands who spent 2006 doing clueless "Crazy" covers. But that's the premise of The Odd Couple: This time, Gnarls don't want anybody to miss how bummed out they are.