Broken Bells: Broken Bells
Broken Bells: Broken Bells
2010, Columbia
Rating: 8.3
Bands like the Shins have to be completely unforgiving for gifted songwriters. You have a band that evokes a time, place, and aesthetic so skillfully that when they don’t execute the form, the album just feels flat.
The Shins’ 2007 effort, Wincing the Night Away, didn’t impress me because of this very fact. I was one of the many caught off guard by James Mercer’s forays into a more diversely arranged version of the Shins. Perhaps it was that I didn’t spend any real time with the record that made me turned off by the new endeavors, or, perhaps, it was that Mercer wasn’t executing with his band that seemed like it could do no wrong. I suspect the latter.
Danger Mouse, the producer that James Mercer collaborated with on the Broken Bells project, brings his own baggage to the table. After high praise for the first Gnarls Barkley album and his genre-shaking Jay-Z and Beatles mashup, The Gray Album, Danger Mouse’s praises had grown cold. Gnarls Barkley’s second album, The Odd Couple, and recording projects with Beck and the Black Keys hadn’t received the praise that was expected from the innovating Hip-Hop producing mastermind.
The stigma surrounding this album loomed for Mercer and Danger Mouse. What would the project sound like? Would this be more hip-hop or indie rock? Would it be any good?
What Mercer and Danger Mouse did was something incredibly straightforward, which was to make a great James Mercer solo record, something that I think most in the press have missed in seeing this project as a collaboration.
Mercer really caught me by surprise on this record. As a listener, I have to admit that I carried a lot of nostalgia into Shins’ records. On one level, they evoked all of the delight that I’d found in records by the Beach Boys. On another level, they began to define an era when I’d grown idealogically. Mercer contributed as much to the soundtrack of my “emo” college days as Davey VonBohlen or Matthew Pryor had. I never really appreciated what was going on in Mercer’s songs until I pulled them outside the Shins’ context because I was nostalgic listening to them, and this never serves the artist well.
Broken Bells start their debut with “The High Road”, a radio single with a snappy electronic-sounding hook at the beginning of the track. There’s the requisite Danger Mouse and Mercer touches throughout the track—weird electronic flourishes by Danger Mouse, big sounding harmonies by Mercer—stuff that a fan of either artist would be familiar with, but neither feels familiar. This is stuff that feels fresh.
This is where the record reveals its thesis. Broken Bells’ debut is about breaking with convention and providing a complementary to unconvention Mercer’s songwriting.
The fifth track, “Sailing to Nowhere”, provides another perfect template for this thesis. Beginning with an organic-feeling Beatles-type song structure and acoustic arrangement, Danger Mouse provides instrumental complements that seem to break the conventional feeling of nostalgia that the song evokes. This is nothing you would find from the 60s, this is something updated, stripped of the conventional approaches that Mercer would take with the Shins to the track. The result is a song stripped of its familiar form and brought back to its most elemental description: this is just a good song.
The album is filled with similar feelings. Tracks like “October” feels like the mid-tempo rocker on the record. The interesting thing about the track is that it ends up feeling so incredibly ‘hip’ that you begin to forget that Mercer is the voice behind the song. You forget the Shins. You forget Gnarls Barkley.
So why is this a James Mercer solo record? If the sound of the record bears all the marks of a collaboration, taking songs in new directions in a ‘hip’, new way indicative of Danger Mouse’s style, isn’t this something that is essentially new for Mercer’s songs and not for Danger Mouse, especially when Mercer seems to be carrying the bulk of the writing duties?
I have to suggest that a listener listen closely to the songwriting. Mercer is all over this project and Danger Mouse’s contributions seem to be entirely aesthetic. That isn’t to demean Danger Mouse’s contribution, but it’s a problem of definition. It really seems like Danger Mouse is contributing in his producer role, diversifying a sound of the songwriter so as to produce something fresh. The structures here don’t seem to mimic the experiments that he’s performing with artists like Cee-Lo or on any of his Hip-Hop projects.
Danger Mouse does seem to prove what he had been trying to prove in past collaborations with other songwriters outside the Hip-Hop realm, which is that he is truly a producer’s producer. He is able to introduce aesthetic choices that are both visionary and inventive, serving songs in such a way that a band could never reproduce. Danger Mouse’s ability to synthesize choices that he had made while deconstructing songs in his Hip-Hop role gives him an understanding of the indie world that simply has no comparison. Songs like “The Ghost Inside” and “The Mall & Misery” simply could not sound any more fresh.
MP3s & Album Cover via eMusic
