Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 06/04/08
Label: Warner Bros

Let's get it out of the way now: no, there isn't another "Crazy" here. Not because Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton and Thomas "Cee-Lo Green" Callaway don't have it in them to make music that resonates far and wide, because their second album shows that that's exactly what they continue to do - but because the duo's first single stopped being a piece of music and became An Event, in which its contexts amplified its contents. A perfect storm of music, mood, technology and time, "Crazy" will never be repeated: leaving Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo to get on with what comes next.

Which is where the Gnarls Barkley story really starts getting interesting. Because "The Odd Couple" is streets ahead of the pair's debut. "St Elsewhere" was the sound of two strong characters getting to know each other - this time, they understand exactly what makes the other tick. Danger's music is designed to provoke, cajole and wring the best out of Cee-Lo, while Callaway's first and most important job was to impress his partner, raise his lyrical and vocal game to match the new heights the music now reaches.

There is a recognisable Gnarls Barkley sound - juicily melodic samples, jagged spaghetti western atmospherics, an evocation of the primacy and eccentricity of early rock'n'roll, and some of the most unsettlingly frank and lyrically abstract old-school-style soul vocals ever recorded. The tracks are short and sometimes brutally edited, leaving the focus on songs so exquisitely presented it's almost like they have their own weather (morning summer mists on "A Little Better", lashing rain in the darkness for "Run (I'm A Natural Disaster)", April showers and breath fogging the window in "She Knows").

The range - sonically and thematically - is as staggering as the execution: "Who's Gonna Save My Soul" is beaten and bruised soul music, still standing but able to communicate only in whispers, while "Open Book" is creepy, haunted and "Would Be Killer" gothic and terrifying. "Surprise" is as jaunty a singalong as you'll ever hear about psychological child abuse, while "Whatever" is a petulant stomp from a grounded teenager's bedroom. Those of a psychogeographic bent may wish to ponder whether "Neighbors" is an answer from the mysterious figure surveilled in Tom Waits' "What's He Building?", a thought that quickly gets disturbing.

Elsewhere, "A Little Better" is the best song about defiantly trying, but still struggling, to overcome heartbreak since John Mayer's "In Repair". Across forty minutes, this is epic yet compact, a film noir in garish technicolour, an album made up of potential singles. And it is destined to last: even five plays in, you're still only scratching the surface. They may never again mean as much to as many at once as they did with "Crazy", but there's sound method to this odd couple's apparent madness.

    by Angus Batey