Music Box | Gnarls Barkley

Mike Newmark Columnist

After Gnarls Barkley’s single “Crazy” spent nine weeks on the top of the U.K. singles chart in 2006, the band’s short, fat half, Cee-Lo Green, removed it from the chart himself so that people would “remember the song fondly and not get sick of it” (The Daily Record, May 28, 2006). So it appears that even Cee-Lo was aware of the song’s potential to annoy. As with St. Elsewhere’s other singles (“Gone Daddy Gone,” “Who Cares?”), one’s enjoyment of “Crazy” seemed to be inversely proportional to how many times one heard it. One to 10 times would put a smile on your face and a skip in your step; 10 to 50 times would put an ache in your head and a roll in your eye; more than 50 times would drive you, uh, you know. These songs are so stuffed with big, dumb pop hooks that lodge themselves inside your brain and stay there, either satisfying your need for pure pop escapism or making you long for an aluminum bat.

No matter its tendency to drive a good person to bat-wielding insanity with excessive plays, people listened to Gnarls Barkley and they liked it: “Crazy” and St. Elsewhere both won Grammies and St. Elsewhere went platinum, even with its notoriously high number of illegal downloads. Perhaps most significantly, Gnarls Barkley’s success caused the band’s tall, skinny half, Danger Mouse—a DJ with almost as many side projects as Guillermo Scott Herren—to want to record a second album. So here we are with The Odd Couple, an album so hotly anticipated that it leaked three weeks before its official April 8 release date, forcing the group to bump its release up to March 25. Their first single, “Run (I’m a Natural Disaster),” already made waves at the beginning of March for its constantly ascending, booty-shaking gospel sound, and for its music video, whose spiraling visual effects caused it to fail an epilepsy test. “Run” is even more invigorating than “Crazy,” and its video was initially banned in the United States, so excuse me for getting a little excited.

You can see where this is going. “Run” isn’t merely the strongest cut on the album; it’s one of the only songs that references Gnarls Barkley at its prime. The Odd Couple is duller, flatter and wearier than St. Elsewhere, but I can’t simply dismiss it as a sophomore slump because I get the feeling that Gnarls Barkley made so many of its decisions consciously. What would normally be the end-of-album comedown, “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul,” is here placed at track number two; it’s bluesy neo-soul that dares not to be catchy, with Cee-Lo belting the title over a defiantly skeletal arrangement. There’s a messed-up song called “Would Be Killer” that immediately follows “Run,” in which Cee-Lo actually admits that he would hurt people if given the chance. Sometimes the despondency shtick works, as on “Charity Case”: A slick bassline and a droning Farfisa glide underneath a strutting Danger Mouse beat, while Cee-Lo sings downer lines like “How are you? I think I can help / But I can’t help myself.” It’s a great song—easily one of their most mature—and makes me think of Subtle at its most melodic. But why oh why did it have to open the album?

The reasons why Gnarls Barkley is suddenly so down-in-the-mouth are anybody’s guess, but regardless, the band is going to have to tour on many of these songs, which makes me shudder a bit. Gnarls Barkley shows are near-legendary events, with the band dressing up in silly guises (Napoleon Dynamite characters, tennis players, airline flight crew) and pumping the energy up to insane levels. There are only a small handful of songs that would make the grade in that context—“Run,” “Going On,” “Surprise,” maybe “A Little Better”—while the rest of the record either drifts off or hits the ears in slightly the wrong way. Even more than St. Elsewhere, The Odd Couple reinforces the notion that, like most of their Atlantic Records brethren, Gnarls Barkley is a singles band, with two or three outstanding songs and a whole lot of filler. And adding insult to injury, the two singles “Run” and “Going On” are so similar that they could theoretically be remixes of each other.

While one might say that while the biggest concern with St. Elsewhere was getting many of its songs’ grating grooves out of your head, The Odd Couple has the opposite problem: Not enough of it stays with you to justify more than a few cursory listens. Fault Danger Mouse for not giving the music much life or personality, throwing off our expectations that The Odd Couple would be one of the liveliest and most distinctive records of the year. And then, what to do about Cee-Lo’s glaringly bitter sentiments? It’s a bit of a shame that Gnarls Barkley has begun to abdicate as America’s most humongous and carefree pop band so early into its career, but something tells me that Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse wanted it that way, almost as though they were planning to break up after The Odd Couple’s completion. It may be too early and more than a little presumptuous to speculate that this is the end, but if it is, Gnarls Barkley is hanging up its Austin Powers costumes in head-scratching fashion.