Review: Broken Bells – S/T
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that a guy who kick-started his career by mashing Jay-Z with the Beatles has been so successful at remolding popular rock artists into classier, hipper versions of themselves. But, after working his future-retro magic on Beck, Cee-Lo, and The Black Keys (!), Danger Mouse’s re-imaginings still possess the capacity to shock. Case in point: He recently teamed up with the Shins’ mastermind James Mercer, a scraggly little imp months away from his fortieth birthday and far past his cultural relevancy expiration date, to form Broken Bells, a “band” that casts the Shins’ verbose and genial indie-folk in a strange, wonderfully psychedelic light. Now, before you get too excited by the p-word, Broken Bells, the duo’s first (and presumably last) full-length collaboration, is not an album to spin while you drop acid and start the revolution. But it is weird and cool and plenty fun to listen to; it’s your parents’ version of psychedelia, which is way better than it probably sounds.
If it’s possible, the ten songs here are probably even less forceful than what you’d generally expect from Mercer. But Burton dresses them up in mellow, organ-drenched finery, pushing lightweight compositions into serious earworm territory. “October,” probably the album’s most successful track, resembles one of Elliott Smith’s Figure 8-era cast-offs, but it’s got a jangly drive that careens past “winsome” straight into “mournful” – it’s like a funeral for dead dreams. “Trap Doors,” another winner, utilizes burbling synthesizers and graceful background “ooohs” on the verses to build toward sparse spaghetti-Western choruses that find Mercer harmonizing with his own “la-la-las.” The net effect is much like the Black Keys’ career-best Attack & Release – an indie lifer grown staid in his once remarkable stylistic tendencies finds an even more perfect vehicle to do basically the same thing he’s always done. If you took the Shins and made them even Shinnier, they’d sound like Broken Bells. Sometimes all you gotta do is go a little further in the same direction; Mercer recently shit-canned half of the Shins to pursue new sounds, but this record proves all he really needed was better sounds.
Broken Bells:
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[...] fucking welcome. In honor of James Mercer’s sprightly new spring disc with Danger Mouse (Broken Bells) we’re making a list of super songs from super groups and (super) collaborations. [...]