Broken Bells, the side project of The Shins’ team captain James Mercer and masterful producer Danger Mouse may have been doomed from the beginning: it seems impossible that the project would live up to the sheer awesomeness of its component parts. But their self-titled debut does a damn good job of delivering solid music. We’d venture to say that this Mercer/Mouse pairing is like musical peanut butter and jelly; Mouse’s crystal-clear production actually enhances Mercer’s trademark vocals.
Mercer’s voice remains best paired with the acoustics of The Shins — no one’s disputing that. Even so, this music works. And, more importantly, it's hard to nail down: picking out a single style that this album embodies is no small task. Just when you’re ready to call Broken Bells a rock ‘n’ roll album, Danger Mouse jumps in with a celestial keyboard or a drum machine. Then, when you’re ready to call it straight up indie rock (as exemplified on lead single “The High Road”), he hits you with a perfect synth riff. You really can’t say that Broken Bells is any one thing; Mouse seems to be enjoying the newfound freedom afforded to him by Mercer’s emotive vocals, and we love it.
It’s difficult to tell exactly where this project is headed; whether it’s time to stop calling it a side project and start calling it a band. Danger Mouse has certainly been all over the musical map, as has Mercer. It’d be easy to write off Broken Bells as a whimsical one-off, but, really, it’s probably more apt to view this as the next phase of two stellar careers.
2.5 Stars
