A lot of people think Gnarls Barkley is a party band. They were whooping it up at the Highline Ballroom on Thursday night, yelling, “Cee-Lo!” (Cee-Lo, the band’s singer) and “Danger!” (Danger Mouse, the band’s keyboardist and producer) between songs.
The band itself was dressed for a frat party gig, in tuxedo jackets (white for the leaders, blue for the backup band) and ruffled shirts. Cee-Lo wore a wig styled like James Brown’s early-1960s processed pompadour. And the music was made for dancing: pumping, socking, upbeat ’60s garage-soul riffs topped with gleeful swoops of analog synthesizer. The band played full tilt throughout the set, looking nerdy and hyperenthusiastic, with heads bobbing and hair flopping.
But the songs said something else. Gnarls Barkley’s worldwide 2006 hit, “Crazy,” applied their reconstituted soul riffs to thoughts of paranoia and fear, and the band’s newer material is equally despondent. At this small club show to start its tour — Cee-Lo called it an “overpaid dress rehearsal” — Gnarls Barkley was promoting its new album, “The Odd Couple” (Downtown/Atlantic), and performed most of the songs on it.
They are about impending disaster (“Run”), the mind of a sociopath (“Would-Be Killer”) and, everywhere, a desperate loneliness: “Even my shadow leaves me all alone at night,” Cee-Lo sang in the first song, “Charity Case.” In “Surprise,” over hand claps and backup vocals of “ba-ba-ba-ba,” he sang, “Everything that’s alive ultimately dies.”
While Cee-Lo dispensed banter between songs, he wasn’t joshing when he sang. He has an old-school soul voice, building from a croon to a rasp, sometimes melting into a pure falsetto; there’s more than a hint of the tense, weary Southern-soul quiver of Bobby (Blue) Bland. Cee-Lo also has a soul singer’s instinct for drama; although the band rarely held back, Cee-Lo did before moaning sustained, all-out confessions like the one in “A Little Better”: “Thank you mom and dad for hurtin’ me so bad.”
Perhaps it takes layers of costumes, self-consciousness and musical anachronism to package that kind of pain for pop hipsters. As long as Gnarls Barkley can get away with being a party band, it should.Continue reading the main story
Santogold, who opened the show, makes noise and discordance catchy. Her trappings come from hip-hop: She was backed by a disc jockey, while two female dancers, deadpan in white sunglasses, flanked her with robotic, synchronized routines.
Santogold’s singsong choruses are full of defiant self-assertion, and every so often her songs draw on a reggae beat. But much of her music is closer to the dance-oriented new wave electro of the early 1980s. Her bright, tinny voice has the quaver of Siouxsie (from the Banshees), the B-52’s or Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; many of her tracks knock together sparse drumbeats and untamed synthesizer riffs behind declarations like “It’s all right — everything they say doesn’t make no sense.”
With its singsong refrains and bristling beats and riffs, Santogold’s pop is ready to elbow its way into the spotlight.Continue reading the main story