Let’s forget, for a moment, about all the extraneous pieces of information surrounding the existence of Gnarls Barkley. Never mind that their first single, “Crazy”, was a pre-release record-breaker in the UK, or that it has a kitschy proclivity for motion picture-themed costumes, or that one-half of its creative team, Danger Mouse, has enjoyed a sudden ubiquity in channel-crossing hipness thanks to his loose-canon Grey Album mash-up. These are the sorts of “buzz ideas” that the media (and, consequently, its audience) continues to traipse around in a typically detached group mentality, all of which have (largely) nothing to do with the actual music made by the group (though they certainly delight its PR firm).
As it turns out, that big chart-razing single is an understatement of colossal proportions: Gnarls Barkley is certifiable. The collaboration between sound technician Danger Mouse and astral soul brother #1 Cee-Lo Green is scatterbrained and compulsive, a collective of voices in varying degrees of twitchy, restless (in)sanity competing for one mind. The duo’s album, St. Elsewhere, its very title an allusion to a 1980s television show that took place inside someone’s head, is a straightjacket of sorts, an attempt to assemble and unify all the squirming, intersecting ideas into some coherence. Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo are, effectively, trying to Harry Houdini their way out of it all.