Crib Notes

Cee-Lo and DangerMouse certainly proved to be The Odd Couple last night on Gnarls Barkley’s return home to Atlanta for a performance at the Variety Playhouse.

For most of the show, Cee-Lo resembled a fired-up storefront preacher mixed with a little bit of a Hell’s Angel as he quickly peeled out of his shiny turquoise tuxedo jacket and black shirt to reveal a black wife-beater, tattooed arms and chest, and a thick gold chain with a cross that dangled down to his pot belly — to which I overheard Jodine of Jodine’s Corner respond, “Big Sexy’s in the building!”

Though he didn’t dance (”This floor is slippery — I was going to show y’all some of my moves.”), he’d half do a little herky jerky thing with his arms every once in awhile then throw them up in the air in a way that reminded me of the little church lady who used to catch the Holy Ghost on the front pew every Sunday.

Meanwhile, Danger Mouse looked like some crazed but concentrated concert pianist as he hunched his back over the keyboard and played ever so slightly. The only thing missing was a candelabra and a black cat.

For the encore, Cee-Lo returned to the stage wearing black shades and smoking a cigarette. Paired with his bald head and gold chain, it immediately conjured up the image of Isaac Hayes, circa his Hot Buttered Soul era. And when DangerMouse sat down at the synthesizer, he began to play two notes in a fashion that almost mimicked Hayes’ classic eight-minute monologue on his remake of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”

Instead, Gnarls Barkley launched into “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul” — a song Cee-Lo told CL in last week’s feature that he originally wrote to mourn James Brown’s death. The lyrics were a perfect ode to the recently deceased Isaac Hayes last night.

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By Ben Westhoff

Ten years from now — or whenever it is we finally come up with a name for the decade we’re currently living in (my vote is for “the aughts”) — no musical act will better epitomize the sound of the times than Gnarls Barkley.

With the duo’s predilection for genre hopping (hip-hop, R&B, indie rock, gospel), ability to concoct a monster single (”Crazy”), and penchant for promoting itself with pop culture imagery (The Big Lebowski, Napoleon Dynamite), it’s surely the most zeitgeist-capturing act around.

Essentially composed of a rapper who sings (Atlanta native Cee-Lo Green) and a mashup specialist who makes breathtakingly original beats (Atlanta/Athens native Danger Mouse), the pair somehow creates touching, soulful music. Buried beneath their technology, gimmicks and nerdy references lie universal truths that seem to reach people in different ways.

Take “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul,” a weepy lament off the group’s sophomore album, The Odd Couple. Green says the song was written in memory of James Brown, but for the recently released video, he wanted something to convey the theme of heartache in general terms. So in the Chris Milk-directed video, a girl breaks up with her boyfriend at a diner. He then proceeds to cut open his chest with a butter knife, pull out his heart and place it on a saucer. The dripping organ then rises and begins to sing Cee-Lo’s woeful lyrics into a stalk of broccoli.

Read the rest of this article here.

(Photo courtesy Jeremy & Claire Weiss)

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It’s official. Danger Mouse and Cee-lo are a couple of geniuses. Or retards.

Check out the new Gnarls Barkley video for “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul,” the two co-directed with Chris Milk (Kanye West’s “Touch the Sky,” “Jesus Walks”). It’s pretty heartless.

After releasing two previous videos from The Odd Couple to little fanfare, “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul” has video-of-the-year written all over it. But maybe I’m just being a fan.

Is it just me, or is this the best video you’ve seen in several years?

Gnarls Barkley recently announced an Atlanta performance w/special guest Janelle Monae. $25/advance. $27.50/day of show. 8:30 p.m. Mon., Aug. 11. Variety Playhouse, 1099 Euclid Ave. www.variety-playhouse.com.

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Gnarls Barkley performed on SNL this weekend. Athens staple and Elephant 6 associate Heather McIntosh (of Athens group the Instruments) played bass. McIntosh also plays cello on the new Gnarls Barkley album, The Odd Couple.

To see a full video of Gnarls Barkley performing the song, “Run (I’m A Natural Disaster)” click here.

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Yesterday, Gnarls Barkley continued teasing the bloggerati with bits about its upcoming album. First, Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse leaked a new song, “Run,” that replicates the late ’60s soul-pop of St. Elsewhere’s “Smiley Faces.” It’s all over the Web, and I found it here.

The duo also revealed the name of the album: The Odd Couple. Billboard.com reports that the two are still in the studio finishing the album, but promise to have it ready for the audience’s inspection in April.

The new Gnarls Barkley album anchors a busy year for former Atlantan Danger Mouse, ending a relatively quiet 2007 in which he only produced Damon Albarn’s project The Good, the Bad & the Queen (which I initially found boring, but the album grew on me). He has finished producing retro-blues duo the Black Keys’ Attack & Release, which drops April 1; is completing a long-delayed album with former Tricky muse Martina Topley-Bird’s The Blue God for this summer; and has worked on British indie-pop band the Shortwave Set’s Replica Sun Machine. None of it is Gorillaz, of course, but it will do.

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Yesterday, Rolling Stone magazine’s Rock & Roll Daily blog posted an item about the upcoming Gnarls Barkley album. While I’m skeptical the album will be ready by April — Billboard magazine made a similar announcement last July — I’m heartened to read that someone outside of Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse’s camp has actually heard some completed songs.

The new Gnarls Barkley disc won’t be released until April, but we got the chance to hear a few new cuts early. The verdict: Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse have produced another album of super-catchy tunes that veer between retro-soul shakedowns, tricked-out psychedelic rock and trunk-rattling hip-hop.

So maybe the follow-up to St. Elsewhere will actually come out this year. Personally, I’m waiting to see if Cee-Lo will ever release any product on his Radiculture Records label.

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