Soundbite: Broken Bells

A new band calling itself Broken Bells, with a debut album of the same name, might attract associations with Christmas carols turned violent or the aftermath of a sleigh-riding accident. Or one might imagine the sound of someone striking the Liberty Bell, the grandest of our nation’s broken bells, which would likely be a huge, dissonant, gong-like experience.

But it might be more helpful to say simply that Broken Bells is a joining of forces between James Mercer and Brian Burton. Mercer is the lead singer of The Shins, apparently named for one of the less musical body parts. Burton, known publicly as Danger Mouse, makes up one half of Gnarls Barkley, which suggests NBA legend Charles Barkley on a surfboard. These are two men uninterested in thematically relevant band names.

In their recent, separate histories, Mercer and Danger Mouse led two of the minority movements in pop music: Mercer and The Shins championed literary, guitar-driven indie rock alongside Death Cab for Cutie, while Danger Mouse and Gnarls Barkley navigated the fringes of the neo-soul revival.

Mercer seems to be playing by Danger Mouse’s rules on “Broken Bells,” and those rules don’t always suit him well. His is not a voice meant to fill stadiums; it doesn’t soar or expand like the one-man gospel choir operated by Cee-Lo Green, the voice of Gnarls Barkley. In that capacity, Danger Mouse often crafted bass-heavy, syncopated swamp clouds of music, a darkness out of which Green’s voice could rise like a revelation.

Some of his compositions for “Broken Bells” are more psychedelic, more insulated and generally less tuneful, allowing Mercer to sing in the inward sort of way he prefers. Their partnership makes the most sense during “The High Road,” a warped, ominous meditation on the ambiguous nature of morality. Mercer drawls the verses as if he’s summoning a southern apocalypse, and Danger Mouse layers the chorus over electronic bleeps and bloops, creating the species of earworm that can haunt your dreams.

Unfortunately, “The High Road” is the album’s opening track and its first single, which should keep Danger Mouse awake for other reasons. He and Green inadvertently sabotaged the future of Gnarls Barkley when they introduced themselves to the world by way of “Crazy,” a single so perfect they could never hope to match it. “The High Road” is not nearly such an insurmountable standard, but neither is the rest of “Broken Bells” as consistently strong as the Gnarls Barkley catalogue.

It’s not that the album is uninteresting; this is an ambitious offering, especially on the part of Danger Mouse. He’s made a habit of pushing musical boundaries, combining live and electronic instrumentation, euphoria and melancholy, hip-hop and rock and any number of other genres. Nor is the album boring ““ “The Ghost Inside” is a rollicking piece of pop, with a punchy bass line and handclaps, and “Trap Doors” rides a tension-and-release pattern to excellent dramatic effect.

In fact, “Broken Bells” is in many ways an intriguing album, certainly among the more intelligent music with a shot at mainstream recognition. But Mercer must have known that collaborating with Danger Mouse would encourage a direct comparison with Green, who is not just a bigger bell ““ he’s more like an air raid siren. Mercer is simply not versatile enough of a singer nor commanding enough of a personality to punctuate these songs to the extent that they deserve. If there’s a broken bell here, it’s him: He’s appealing but small, and in this context he doesn’t quite work.

““ Alex Goodman

E-mail Goodman at [email protected].