Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi Rome (2011)

From

Back in 2006, right around the genesis of Gnarls Barkley, producer Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) was queried by Chuck Klosterman as to who his biggest influences were as an artist. His very telling response? Woody Allen. For nearly a decade now, Burton’s music has — like Allen’s films — defied any manner of simple explanation, collaborating with everyone from left-field hip-hop luminary MF Doom and alterna-rock hero Damon Albarn on Demon Days and The Good, the Bad & the Queen, to the Shins’ James Mercer in Broken Bells and producing the Black Keys’ last couple of records. Things aren’t exactly slowing down for Burton either; he’s in the studio producing U2′s forthcoming 13th studio record.

Even as his work manages to avoid classification, just about anything with Danger Mouse’s name in the production credits shares a singular, idiosyncratic vision, a compelling midpoint between retro nostalgia and hyper-futurism perhaps best captured on his much-lauded 2004 mash-up, the Grey Album, which saw him seamlessly combine the Beatles’ White Album instrumentals with Jay-Z’s Black Album a capella tracks. Burton’s love of Italian film scores is well-documented; his Gnarls Barkley outfit’s ubiquitous smash hit “Crazy” samples liberally from the soundtrack to a 1968 spaghetti western, Viva! Django, while many of the groups other tracks (like the Odd Couple‘s “Surprise”) rely heavily on the genre’s typically sweeping strings, choir sections, and steady percussion.

Enter noted Italian film score composer/arranger/producer Daniele Luppi, whose lengthy rap-sheet includes collaborations with Broken Bells, John Legend, Mike Patton and work on the Sex and the City movie. Luppi and his arrangements figure heavily into Burton’s aforementioned fixation on spaghetti western soundtracks (he also conducted strings on both Gnarls Barkley records). Together, the two spent several years rounding up the legendary orchestra and choir who recorded on some of the genre’s most seminal albums: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. Recorded in the same hallowed studio where those albums and many more were cut decades ago, Rome manages to somehow toe the fine line between a reverently vintage soundtrack and a sprawling, post-modern Western concept album. But with its sweeping choral and orchestral parts, interludes and evocative instrumental pieces rendered in widescreen, much of the record ends up sounding more like a movie soundtrack without the sort of visual accompaniment that often makes even the best film scores even better.

Enter Jack White and Norah Jones to fill in said gap. Each of the two voice a nameless character on three songs a piece (think: Clint Eastwood’s lead role as the Man with No Name in the Good, the Bad and the Ugly). Half-crooning over the psychedelic twang of “The Rose with a Broken Neck” and carrying the splendid album closer “The World” through to its strutting conclusion, White plays the lead with archetypal cowboy swagger. Even on the limp, schizophrenic “Two Against One”, the icon seems more comfortable than he has in a while, reveling in the dimmed spotlight. Jones is a revelation, lending a hushed, sultry air to the moody overtones of “Problem Queen” and “Black” and finally proving to be much more than just a pretty voice. While she might at first seem an odd choice for the part alongside musicians as renowned as Danger Mouse and Jack White, Jones certainly holds her own on Rome, often stealing the show completely, as she does on the tense, steamy number “Season’s Trees”.

Perhaps the best thing about Rome is how open-ended it is. Is Danger Mouse shopping his soundtracking skills to Hollywood studios? Will this splendid production, orchestra and all, hit the road for an extensive tour? For all of its glorious string flourishes, vivid visual allusions, and bursts of choral splendor, the best parts of Rome are truly left to the imagination. While it easily could’ve been little more than a tribute to a (regrettably) bygone Golden Age in cinema or a soundtrack to an imaginary movie, Rome succeeds at much more: It’s a fantastic album in its own right.

Danger Mouse The Grey Album (2004)

From pitchfork.com

Remix albums rarely have purely noble intentions. From underground promotional vehicles to hobbyist experiments for props at local watering holes, the concept of backing familiar voices with unexpected surroundings had been all but lost to simpler production clinics with high profile guests.

That is, until Danger Mouse (best known for his work with Jemini and Sage Francis) turned a color inference into an underground phenomenon with his bootleg conceptual assault, The Grey Album, a remix album that pairs the vocals of Jay-Z’s Black Album with The Beatles’ legendary White Album.

By the most basic rules of the homemade remix, the record works: The vocals are on beat, pauses are natural, and the background always works thematically with the lyrics. In these more technical areas, the record effectively succeeds. But the most exciting part of any remix project is hearing whether or not the producer can save your least favorite songs, and this is clearly where DM shines. “Moment of Clarity” was the kind of awkwardly misplaced synthetic emotion expected from posthumous Tupac records.

Here, however, it’s a stomping guitar monster, with John Lennon’s chopped vocals croaking like one of its victims. And while the original “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” sounded like Timbo going through the motions (if he decided to morph into The Neptunes for a day), Danger Mouse’s rendition is like Prefuse 73 meeting David Banner, arguing chops over handclaps and eventually finding middle ground through a second strangulation of Mr. Lennon.

Of course, it isn’t all so progressive. Similar to the fates of “December 4th” and “Change Clothes”, “What More Can I Say” works on the tone it develops, but ultimately ends up too simple to hold attention. “My 1st Song” is enjoyable for the harsh drums that DM tracks and the closing statements that have Jay-Z doing the Charleston over “Cry Baby Cry”. Of course, Shawn Carter’s elastic speed-rap is near impossible to capture, as evidenced by the distracting guitar-crashing effect which closes off every few couplets. Most glaringly, no remix attempt is made on “The Threat”, arguably Jay-Z’s hardest performance on The Black Album, while “Lucifer” is sacrificed at the altar of conceptualism: DM simply inverts a couple Jigga vocals, chops up vocals and pianos, and inserts a bass riff and orchestral bits from “I’m So Tired” and “Revolution 9”.

Though DM’s takes are obviously more rock-centric than the original Jay-Z tracks, they still manage to be undeniably in tune with the spirit of hip-hop. “PSA” is turned from a menacing spin on a Black Moon standard to woodland crunk with rings of Robin Hood flute, acoustic finger flicking and truncated outbursts from George Harrison. And “99 Problems” turns the obvious rock nod into a slightly more pronounced clinic in “Helter Skelter” headbanging, with panning walls of guitar sound and a chugging main riff that, in this context, reminds me of Kool Keith’s “I’m Destructive”.

Danger Mouse was recently issued a cease-and-desist by EMI regarding this project’s Beatle-sampling. While he insists the record was intended only as a promotional item, 3,000 copies are already in circulation, and one can’t help but feel the loom of a forthcoming lawsuit. So the question now is, was the creative payoff of this project worth the possibilities of this potential worst-case-scenario? Well: While The Grey Album is truly one of the more interesting pirate mashups ever done, it ultimately fails at the hands of perfectionism with several pieces sounding rushed to beat some other knucklehead to his clever idea.

Additionally, the missing songs and occasionally poor tracking means the project take a few hits. Still, it’s stronger than it ought to be given the disparity between the two artists, and as far as raw experimentation goes, it further proves DM as a wildly imaginative producer. Even taken out of the context of listenability, The Grey Album will end up the trivia answer we’ll always love to submit.