Gnarls Barkley
St. Elsewhere (4 stars)
Sonically, Gnarls Barkley is a match made in, well, I haven't quite figured that out. Maybe that's the point.
The pairing of Goodie Mob expat Cee-Lo (truth be told, he was the Atlanta collective's main talent) and colorfully deranged beatsmithing wunderkind Danger Mouse (he of the Jay-Z/Beatles Grey Album mash-up) produces a musical collaboration that defies cozy description. Best I could come up with is underground hip-pop smoothed out with a funked-up, electronica, R&B twist.
Not quite Outkast-ian in its hip-hop genre-bending—there's no "Hey Ya," although "Crazy" has Britain all agog—St. Elsewhere feels no less surreal or innovative. Cee-Lo is his usual soulfully raspy singing self. On the rap tip, he eschews his typical God talk for some atypical folly. Take the Esham-esqe "Necromancer": "It's naughty, very naughty necrophilia/without a care, I'm compassionate about killing her/I'd have my way with what's left of the will in her/Cosmopolitans and cocaine and an occasional pill in her."
And he calls himself a Muslim.
Top to bottom, the whole CD is confusingly delightful, Danger Mouse's eclectic beats the yin to Cee-Lo's verbal yang. Their mind-meld is particularly effective on the brutally melancholy title track, "St. Elsewhere," on which Cee-Lo alternates low-pitched rapping and high-pitched singing in each verse: (rapping) "Way over yonder, there is a new frontier/Would it be so hard for you to come and visit me here? (singing) I understand/Would you just send me a message in a bottle then, baby? St. Elsewhere." I'm not sure why he switched back and forth. Maybe that's the point.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Stadium Arcadium (3 stars)
The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been all over the press touting double album Stadium Arcadium as the best thing they've ever done, and a surprising number of reviewers have agreed with them. But Stadium Arcadium is, at most, maybe the fourth-best thing they've ever done, and that's only if you put it ahead of their first three albums, which were sort of erratic but nevertheless genuinely new and exciting.
Stadium Arcadium is not new and exciting. It's mostly an expansion of the sound the Peppers perfected on their last album, 2002's By the Way, a pleasant mid-tempo rock that's neither particularly aggressive nor excessively mellow. This works perfectly well in small doses—lead single "Dani California" is as catchy as anything the band has done in the last decade—but spread out over two discs and 28 tracks, it quickly runs together into an indistinguishable sonic mush.
Coming after the singularly funkless By the Way, it's refreshing that Stadium Arcadium at least breaks out the funk on a few tracks. The irresistibly booty-shaking "Hump de Bump" is the album's best song and could easily have been an outtake from 1991's Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and "Readymade" recalls the energetic hard rock of the band's brief alliance with guitarist Dave Navarro. That the album's highlights are reminders of the past, though, only proves that the Peppers' best days remain sadly behind them.
THE RACONTEURS
Broken Boy Soldiers (3 stars)
Meg White bashers, this disc's for you. And for all the folks who've wondered what the White Stripes might sound like with an actual bassist, and maybe a second vocalist. And, of course, for those of us just plain tired of the red-and-white color scheme, not to mention that whole sister-brother/divorced couple foolishness.
Two years ago, Jack White's production work on Loretta Lynn's terrific comeback album offered a rosy glimpse of what the Detroit native might accomplish outside the blues-rock confines of the wildly popular but musically limiting Stripes. This outing, which teams him with indie superfriends Brendan Benson, Patrick Keeler and Jack Lawrence, largely fails to fulfill that promise, coming off as an adequate yet unsatisying one-off curiosity.
The bouncy rhythmic pulse of opener "Steady as She Goes" and Benson's "ooh ooh ooh wah oohs" on second cut "Hands" suggest the Raconteurs are all about 1970s power-pop, but that mission careens off course with the Eastern-spiced "Broken Boy Soldier" and the slow blues "Blues Veins," both of which could have been yanked from De Stijl, or maybe Led Zeppelin's Presence. In contrast to those funereal moments, Benson's airy "Together" and "Yellow Sun" sound positively wimpy, though his "Call it a Day" does manage to bridge the stylistic gap.
"I'm adding something new into the mixture," Benson sings in "Together." But while new is different and different is commendable, the patchwork Broken Boy Soldiers ultimately fails to expand White's legend the way so many hoped it might.