Plumbiferous Media

After putting The Shins on hia­tus, front­man James Mer­cer started a side project with pro­ducer and musi­cian Brian Bur­ton (bet­ter known as Dan­ger Mouse), Bro­ken Bells. Their self-titled debut album was released ear­lier this month. While Bro­ken Bells dis­plays some of the cre­ativ­ity of both of the tal­ented musi­cians involved, the collaboration’s true poten­tial only shows up at the album’s best points, while the rest of the album is gen­er­ally (and dis­ap­point­ingly) banal.

After his excel­lent work with The Shins, the nuanced, quiet power of James Mercer’s voice is unmis­tak­able. Unfor­tu­nately, Mercer’s voice only reaches its high­est poten­tial at cer­tain points - the first sec­tion of “Vapor­ize” is rem­i­nis­cent of the best tracks of Chutes Too Nar­row, but much of the rest of Bro­ken Bells seems to have accom­plished the rather dubi­ous goal of mak­ing Mercer’s voice unre­mark­able. Overuse of vocal effects on a few tracks or a sim­ple mis­match between Mercer’s voice and the musi­cal tone are gen­er­ally respon­si­ble for this, which makes this prob­lem even more of a pity as both are cer­tainly correctable.

Given the artists on the album, the amount of cre­ativ­ity on it is unsur­pris­ing. The best tracks come together per­fectly to cre­ate a strange, styl­ized and com­pletely unique expe­ri­ence. The most com­pelling of these is arguably “Sail­ing to Nowhere,” a pur­pose­fully frag­mented track, which, com­bined with the pri­mar­ily dark, minor chords, becomes emo­tion­ally engulf­ing - not to men­tion it fits per­fectly with the title and lyrics of the track.

Unfor­tu­nately, it takes the album until the track prior to “Sail­ing to Nowhere” to even come together, and the album doesn’t main­tain per­fec­tion for long. While the first few tracks have great synth and organ lines, they mix fairly badly with the rich gui­tar, which in turn doesn’t quite match up with the vocals. The per­cus­sion is gen­er­ally cen­tered in its highs, and doesn’t res­onate as well as the other lines, and the entire ensem­ble is roughly shoved together. Much of the later album has a dif­fer­ent prob­lem; while the instru­ments do have a ten­dency to match with one another more fre­quently, tracks will often go on for far too long, or be sim­ply some­what unin­ter­est­ing from the start.

As lyrics go, Bro­ken Bells is quite good. Mer­cer has put the same cre­ative energy into the album as he did with The Shins, and, though Bro­ken Bells doesn’t con­tain any sin­gle track quite as cap­ti­vat­ing as some of The Shins’ best work, many of the album’s tracks are quite inter­est­ing, includ­ing “Vapor­ize,” where Mer­cer asks “What amounts to a dream any­more?” and “The High Road,” where he talks about “the dawn to end all nights.”

Bro­ken Bells is really only a great album in name. That is, it has Dan­ger Mouse and James Mer­cer on the same album. But while it’s great to finally hear Mercer’s voice again, the album not much more than a mis­matched quilt of strong but unin­ter­face­able styles. Of course, it’s not really a sur­prise - James Mer­cer and Dan­ger Mouse really does seem an odd com­bi­na­tion - and it isn’t the first time in the past year that a num­ber of musi­cal super­pow­ers have gath­ered to cre­ate an album that sounds, at its core, like a power strug­gle (see Them Crooked Vul­tures). Still, Bro­ken Bells prob­a­bly could have been done better.

This post is tagged 50-59, Broken Bells