Song upon song bears a multi-tracked choir of trembling, throaty Cee-Los, like Motown’s greatest girl group cloned umpteen times and hauled shrieking through a wormhole studded with nightmares, fantasies, and other pieces of morally ambiguous paranoia. Think of it like this: the Supremes starring in Moonraker. Whoa, so Gnarls Barkley is challenging? Sorta, but only in that soul-band-fumbling-around-for-the-tiny-shards-of-its-splintered-consciousness kinda way. The result is filthily refreshing and beside itself with ingenuity, a beastly union of early Mothers of Invention crudity with the combustible sexuality of Diana Ross and George Clinton.
Elsewhere‘s defining action, the thing that ignites it deep into pop cultural outer space. Elsewhere was produced in the increasingly common “via mail” practice, a method that breeds ol’ fashioned one-upmanship: each building block sent from Danger Mouse to Cee-Lo and vice versa was a freaky attempt to out-weird the other.
So wait, Gnarls Barkley is magic? Not exactly, although our attention may frequently be sidetracked by the plethora of madness that spills from the duo’s trick-bag. Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo are, effectively, trying to Harry Houdini their way out of it all. Elsewhere, its very title an allusion to an ’80s television show that took place inside someone’s head, is the straightjacket of sorts, the attempt to assemble and unify all the squirming, intersecting ideas into some kind of coherency. The collaboration between sound technician Danger Mouse and astral soul brother #1 Cee-Lo Green is scatterbrained and compulsive, a collective of voices in varying degrees of twitchy, restless (in)sanity competing for one mind. These are the sorts of “buzz ideas” that the media (and, consequently, its audience) continues to traipse around in a typically detached group mentality, all of which have (largely) nothing to do with the actual music made by the group (though they certainly delight its PR firm).Īs it turns out, that big chart-razing single is an understatement of colossal proportions: Gnarls Barkley is certifiable. Never mind that its first single, “Crazy”, was a pre-release record-breaker in the UK, or that it has a kitschy proclivity for motion picture-themed costumes, or that one-half of its creative team, Danger Mouse, has enjoyed a sudden ubiquity in channel-crossing hipness thanks to his loose-canon Grey Album mash-up. Let’s forget, for a moment, about all the extraneous pieces of information surrounding the existence of Gnarls Barkley.
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