33 1/3′s classic album series of books attempts to deconstruct each LP by talking to the parties involved in its creation. Following books based on DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing and Nas’ Illmatic, their next subjects will be J. Dilla’s Donuts, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album. Check out descriptions and covers for each below.

J Dilla – Donuts – April 24th, 2014

From a Los Angeles hospital bed, equipped with little more than a laptop and a stack of records, James “J Dilla” Yancey crafted a set of tracks that would forever change the way beatmakers viewed their artform. The songs on Donuts are not hip hop music as “hip hop music” is typically defined; they careen and crash into each other, in one moment noisy and abrasive, gorgeous and heartbreaking the next. The samples and melodies tell the story of a man coming to terms with his declining health, a final love letter to the family and friends he was leaving behind. As a prolific producer with a voracious appetite for the history and mechanics of the music he loved, J Dilla knew the records that went into constructing Donuts inside and out. He could have taken them all and made a much different, more accessible album. If the widely accepted view is that his final work is a record about dying, the question becomes why did he make this record about dying?

Drawing from philosophy, critical theory and musicology, as well as Dilla’s own musical catalogue, Jordan Ferguson shows that the contradictory, irascible and confrontational music found on Donuts is as much a result of an artist’s declining health as it is an example of what scholars call “late style,” placing the album in a musical tradition that stretches back centuries.

Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - June 5, 2014

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Kanye West created the most compelling body of pop music by an American artist during the period. Rising from obscurity as a precocious producer through the ranks of Jay Z’s Roc-A-Fella records, by the time he released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in late 2010, West had evolved into a master collagist, an alchemist capable of transfiguring semi-obscure soul samples and indelible beats into a brash and vulnerable new art form.

A look at the arc of his career – from the heady chipmunk soul exuberance of The College Dropout (2004) to the operatic narcissism of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010) – tells us about the march of pop music into the twenty-first century and, by extension, the contradictions that define our cultural epoch. In a cloud-based and on-demand culture – a place of increasing virtualization, loneliness, and hyper-connectivity – West straddles this critical moment as what David Samuels of The Atlantic calls “the first true genius of the iPhone era, the Mozart of contemporary American music.” Swallowing the chaos wrought by his public persona and digesting it as a grandiose allegory of self-redemption, Kanye uses his narcissism to paint masterstroke after masterstroke on MBDTF, a 69-minute hymn to egotistical excess. With astonishing soundscapes comprising a host of familiar voices (MBDTF includes samples and interpolations of King Crimson, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Rick James, Black Sabbath, Aphex Twin, and many others), no other artist has so deftly curated conversations between pop music’s past and future – very much a story of our culture’s wish for unfettered digital ubiquity – and no album tells this story with more decadent artistry and surrealist gusto than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

Danger Mouse – The Grey Album - Sept. 11, 2014

This book marks the tenth anniversary of The Grey Album. The online release and circulation of what Danger Mouse called his ‘art project’ was an unexpected watershed in the turn-of-the-century brawls over digital creative practice. The album’s suppression inspired widespread digital civil disobedience and brought a series of contests and conflicts over creative autonomy in the online world to mainstream awareness. The Grey Album highlighted, by its very form, the profound changes wrought by the new technology and represented the struggle over the tectonic shifts in the production, distribution and consumption of music. But this is not why it matters.

Danger Mouse created a broad, inventive commentary on forms of musical creativity that have defined all kinds of music for centuries: borrowing, appropriation, homage, derivation, allusion and quotation. The struggle over this album wasn’t just about who gets to use new technology and how. The battle over The Grey Album struck at the heart of the very legitimacy of a long recognised and valued form of musical expression: the interpretation of the work of one artist by another.

Each book is up for preorder now via Amazon.com.

Cee-Lo Green tells an annoying TMZ reported that a Gnarls Barkley reunion will happen “Like, next year… Really”.

Producer Danger Mouse teases a new Broken Bells LP with the release of this video, following up the group’s 2010, self-titled debut, which he produced in full. The new album is called After The Disco, set for release in January of 2014. Check out a preview of the album’s first single below.

Broken Bells Album Teaser from Columbia Records on Vimeo.

Uber-producer DJ Danger Mouse has come a long way since his early days as a foward-thinking mixtape DJ. Since his explosion in popularity that began with The Grey Album, DM has made a name for himself by producing for a multitude of A-List talent, including Cee-Lo Green, The Black Keys, Gorillaz, MF Doom, Beck, and others, with a rumored U2 album in works. To say the least, our man has come a long way.

But going back to those early, pre-Grey Album mixtape releases, DM had a fascination with laid back groups like Portishead and Zero 7, both of which built their sound from spaghetti western samples and atmospheric backdrops. For his latest project, Rome, Danger Mouse teams with Italian film soundtrack composer Daniele Luppi, to craft an album that pays homage to that lost, classic sound.

While much of the album is instrumental, as an added bonus we get vocals from Norah Jones and White Stripes frontman, Jack White. The album exudes greatness with it’s cinematic instrumental sound on songs like “Roman Blue” and “The Gambling Priest”, but the addition of these two comes as a welcome surprise. “The Rose With A Broken Neck”, “Two Against One”, and “The World” find White a bit outside of his element, trading his usual dirty, sparse rock sound for super-chill, while Norah seduces with her breathy vocals on “Season’s Trees”, “Problem Queen”, and “Black”.

If critics can blast this album for anything, it might be argued that this is ground already well covered by Zero 7, or that album’s unified sound makes certain tracks bleed into one another. We’ll plead the case that Danger Mouse has instead resurrected a lost sound and created an incredibly dope album in the process.

In a recent interview with The Age, U2 frontman, Bono, revealed that a recent accident – which almost left him paralyzed – sent the group into production overtime, working on three different LP’s. The first of these albums, to be released next year, will be produced by Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton.

“We have about 12 songs with him,” Bono said. “At the moment that looks like the album we will put out next because it’s just happening so easily.”

Meanwhile, they are also working on a “club” record with producers David Guetta, Will.I.Am, and Red One, as well as an album centered around the 20 songs the band has written for the Spider-Man Broadway musical.

Dark Night Of The Soul is an album by Danger Mouse and Mark Linkous aka Sparklehorse… joined by the following remarkable roll call of guests: Gruff Rhys, The Flaming Lips, Jason Lytle, Julian Casablancas, Black Francis, Iggy Pop, David Lynch, James Mercer, Nina Persson, Suzanne Vega and the late Vic Chesnutt.

Rumours of this mysterious collaborative project began to circulate in early 2009, however, whilst Dark Night Of The Soul successfully manifested itself as both a limited edition art book with enclosed blank CD-R and an audio-visual gallery installation, its music was never released officially.

Whilst this beautiful, haunting record being made widely and legitimately available is undoubtedly a cause for celebration, the news is shadowed by sadness following the recent passing of Mark Linkous, who released and performed under the Sparklehorse pseudonym. Dark Night Of The Soul will now stand as a de facto tribute to this well-loved, stunningly talented yet often-overlooked artist and has received the blessing of Mark’s family who have issued the following statement:

“Mark felt that it was an honor to be able to collaborate with so many of the artists on this record.  His time and dedication to this project was immense and his hopes for its release are finally being realized. We are glad that people will now be able to hear these songs and know the beautiful gift that Mark shared with all of us through his music.”

Danger Mouse adds: “I told Mark that we’d worked things out with EMI back in January and he was very happy that the album was finally going to be released this year. Mark meant a great deal to a lot of people and I’m grateful to have made music with him and to be a part of his legacy.”

Dark Night Of The Soul is also dedicated to the memory of Vic Chesnutt.

In addition to featuring on two songs, David Lynch has created a series of original photographs for Dark Night Of The Soul adding a spectacular visual dimension that will be incorporated in to the artwork for this already unparalleled project.

Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night Of The Soul will be released on 12th July in the UK and on 13th July in the US.

More information at www.dnots.com

This is kind of cool…. Danger Mouse and James Mercer (The Shins) are Broken Bells, if you don’t know, and have teamed with MySpace Transmissions for a free downloadable EP, featuring “stripped stripped-back renditions of the songs performed and recorded during the session, including ‘The Ghost Inside’, ‘The High Road’, ‘October’ and ‘Vaporize’. These versions sound very similar to the originals, but are a good way to get a taste of the full-length album, available now. Grab it here.

The absence of Danger Mouse on this year’s Gorillaz LP was duly noted, with the end result sounding something closer to Damon Albarn’s last entry, The Good The Bad and The Queen. Still a quality release, it somehow lacked the diversity of the previous two records. Where was Danger this time around? Instead, working with The Shins’ lead vocalist and guitarist, James Mercer on a collaborative project called Broken Bells, coincidentally (or not) released the same day as Gorillaz Plastic Beach LP.

The sound of Broken Bells is less folky than that of The Shins, and instead takes more of a melodic, downtempo sound, coming off like a more organic Zero 7. The opening track and lead single “The High Road” is a sort of mooged out mellow progressive rock track, as Mercer lends an almost country twang not unlike that of Chris Isaak to this hypnotic head nodder. The album takes many turns, some of it’s best moments being it’s softest. “Your Head Is On Fire”, for instance is a breezy, mostly instrumental track that one might hear in the air in Twin Peaks, while “Trap Doors” is a mesmerizing exercise in repetition that soothes the soul. The crown jewel among this handful of tracks is “Citizen”, a heavily chilled, atmospheric track that plays in the open wilderness.

On the flipside of things, “The Ghost Inside” sounds eerily like something Danger might have been grooming for a future Gorillaz record, complete with Mercer doing his best Albarn impression. The brooding “Mongrel Heart” plays like a lonely ride down Lost Highway, while the post-new wave “The Mall and Misery” closes the LP, rounding out the album with a diverse palette of sounds.

The always illustrious Danger Mouse has come a long way since his humble beginnings as a creative mixtape deejay, adding yet another solid LP to a catalog of collaborators that includes MF Doom, Cee-Lo Green, Beck, David Lynch, Sparklehorse, and others. While he may be moving further and further away from his roots in hip-hop music, there’s no doubt the quality of his sound can be seen in whatever he does.

]]> http://www.hiphopsite.com/2010/03/20/broken-bells-danger-mouse-james-mercer-review/feed/ 0 http://www.hiphopsite.com/2010/03/11/broken-bells-the-high-road-live-on-letterman/ http://www.hiphopsite.com/2010/03/11/broken-bells-the-high-road-live-on-letterman/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:33:21 +0000 http://www.hiphopsite.com/?p=8002

Danger Mouse is live on drums… This shit is really dope. Broken Bells LP review coming soon….Big up to theaudiopervjr for catching this.

Yesterday we alerted you that National Public Radio was offering full streams of the Gorillaz Plastic Dreams LP, and today they release full audio streams for Danger Mouse and James Mercer’s (The Shins) collaborative LP, Broken Bells. Check it out here. (Warning: rapping not included).

Featuring interviews with Chuck D, DJ Q-Bert, Pete Rock, Afrika Bambaataa, Aesop Rock, Mix Master Mike, De La Soul, Danger Mouse and a bunch of stuffy lawyers, this documentary examines the history of sampling in hip-hop music, and how the legalities behind it changed the entire landscape of hip-hop music. Perhaps the best quote in the trailer is El-P’s: “If you can catch me, then I didn’t do my job”. The film is out on ITunes now.

Pre-Order On Itunes

That sneaky Brian Burton. Among Danger Mouse’s greatest hits in pissing off the RIAA and other members of the music industry are the following:

1) The pressing up of limited edition Jay-Z & The Beatles Grey Album vinyl LP’s, numbering them, and then sending them to his friends. After the whole fallout and cease of desist letters, DM got creative in how he would release the vinyl, which was being pressed prior to all of the legal shit going down. Keeping tabs on who had been assigned each numbered copy, if any escaped into the wild (i.e. Ebay), he could then track down who sold their copy, and then… I don’t know, write them a nasty email, take them off his Top 8, whatever.

2) Teaming up with mysterious graf-artist-turned-mainstream-acceptable-artist, Banksy, for his Paris Hilton remix project. Here, Banksy altered the artwork of Paris Hilton’s CD inserts with song titles like “why am I famous”, “what have I done”, etc, while Danger Mouse replaced the CD’s with his own remix interpretation of the album. Apparently these CD’s were mixed in on record store shelves among the real Paris CD’s.

In his latest stunt, Danger Mouse has gone around the corporate machine to release his collaborative album with indie rocker Sparklehorse and director David Lynch, Dark Night Of The Soul. The package was released as a mail order set available through the project’s official website www.dnots.com. The now sold out project (5000 copies pressed, sold at $50 each) included a massively packaged CD, including a 50 page booklet with photography by David Lynch, whom also sings on the album. However, the CD inside was blank and recordable, with a sticker on the packaging reading, “For legal reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.”

Obviously, this was a tongue-in-cheek way to distribute the album without breaching his legal contracts with EMI, Lex Records, or any other labels affiliated with him or the other artists involved with this album (Iggy Pop, Flaming Lips, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Suzanne Vega, etc). Sure the CD was blank, but the album is widely available online for download. He’s crafty!

You can also listen to the album streaming at NPR.Org if you don’t want to risk getting sued for $2 million dollars. - DJ Pizzo

      So who are those old blokes? Of course Damon Albarn, who teams up with Verve guitarist Simon Tong, Clash bassist Paul Simonon, and Africa70 drummer Tony Allen; all sewn together nicely with the board work of Danger Mouse.  But while DM’s involvement in projects like Gorillaz and Gnarls Barkley added unmistakable hip-hop influence, it’s notably absent here. But that’s what separates this record from other projects any of the above mentioned artists have been involved with, is that it is it’s own animal entirely.  The foundations of each artist are here, each of who lend characteristics of their respective signature sounds to create something new entirely.  

    In a nutshell, The Good The Bad and The Queen is a collection of folk rock songs about England, which will obviously keep it from being this year’s Gorillaz, and probably much more successful in it’s country of origin – like mince pie. Regardless, once over the fact that there isn’t any boom-bap on the record, listeners that were open-minded enough to enjoy the non-rap content of Demon Days, will find themselves enjoying the slow burn of this record as it seeps into the consciousness. 

     So while West London might not be your backyard, let Albarn be your tour guide, as he literally takes you on a walk through his neighborhood (hey, rappers do this shit all the time). The lead single, “Herculean” is perhaps one of the album’s most accessible songs, with some of the most harder edged guitar licks you’ll find on the record, still emanating an overall cool, breezy vibe to the song. The politics of the country are touched upon many times, such as on the album opener, “History Song”, which examines the early tree-hangings; or on “Nature Springs”, where Albarn expresses his frustration with the loss of identity and Americanization of the U.K.  Again on “Kingdoom of Doom”, Albarn suggests that pop culture and the excitement of Friday nights has the country turning a blind eye to actions of it’s government. Hey, us yanks can relate.   

     In all of it’s beautiful, melancholy, bittersweet glory, The Good The Bad and The Queen is a project all it’s own, with the influence of many English rock pioneers (David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and of course, The Clash) looming above it. It’s different than anything the artists have done elsewhere, sounding like a (*shudder*) “mash-up” of each collaborator’s individual influence. Certainly not at all hip-hop, but highly original and very enjoyable.

    Fresh off producing one of the biggest pop/rock albums (if we dare call Gorillaz that) of the year, DJ Danger Mouse switches gears to instead produce perhaps the biggest underground album of the year with Dangerdoom. The sound is different that what was found on Gorillaz, but still trademark DM, as the Mouse hooks up hard hitting, dusty dirty beats for The Mask to spit over. Two of the best examples of this are on the album’s highest profile collaborations, “The Mask” (feat. Ghostface) and “Old School” (feat. Talib Kweli). “The Mask” finds Doom and Ghost celebrating their like-minded love for iron armor, over raucous horns and snapping drums. “Old School” on the other hand joins former touring buddies Doom and Talib with classic production that finds the two competing for the spotlight, reminiscing on Saturday mornings of cartoons and cereal. Cee-Lo also guest appears, on the more polished “Bizzy Box”, giving a hint of what to expect from Danger and Green’s upcoming Gnarls Barkley project. 

    The collaborations are appreciated, but Doom is in his element when ripping tracks solo. “Sofa King” is perhaps the quintessential Dangerdoom track, as Doom spits his usual, humorous narratives over Danger’s melodic violin arrangements, and the Aqua Teen Hunger Force pummels the “sofa king” joke into the ground. Again on “Crosshairs”, classical violins get freaked for similar results. “Mince Meat” is another excellent selection, as Doom’s monotone delivery compliments Danger’s tribal drums and Asian flute mix. 

     As the album progresses, it gets wackier and wackier. Case in point is “Vats Of Urine”, where Doom proclaims “everybody’s talking about pistols, gats is boring / came with a new topic to flip: vats of urine”, before entering a minute and a half diatribe on the creative uses for large containers of piss. “Space Ho’s” follows, which finds Doom trying to takeover Space Ghost: Coast To Coast, ranting about why he is more qualified for the job. Needless to say, this doesn’t make Space Ghost happy.

    Sewn together with skits featuring various members of the Adult Swim cast (all on a “how can I be down” quest), Danger Doom is another satisfying fix from MF Doom, which further cements DJ Danger Mouse as one of hip-hop’s top producers. The fourteen tracks lend about forty minutes of music, leaving the listener drooling for more as the last track ends. Luckily both Danger and Doom are two of the hardest working men in hip-hop, with plenty of more offshoot projects in the works for ’06. Now how about that sequel?

Jemini and Danger Mouse work so cohesively as a unit that Air Jordan and Scotty would be green with envy. The Gifted One possesses the skills and also showcases his dexterity as an emcee as he flips through a tirade of subjects. From dissecting his stance as an African-American during the Bush era on the politically driven “Bush Boys” to weighing the ethics
of drug consumption on the humorous “Don’t Do Drugs” (check the jabs at our famous druggie celebrities). But we all recognize Jemini is at his best when he spends his mic time boasting about himself as seen on “The Only One” where he ruptures through DM’s raw-as-hell production. Danger Mouse’s production is just begging to be ripped apart by a no frills emcee
in which Jemini conveniently obliges. Not to mention the splendid “That Brooklyn Shit” where DM’s neck snapping snares collide with both of Jemini’s personas. DM consistently provides the platform for the gifted one to grab his proverbial nuts and put that extraordinary talent to work. Never does Jemini shaft the listener out of one red cent; it’s all about getting your money’s worth.

With Ghetto Pop Life being stuffed with Jemini’s dual personalities one has to wonder if there is room for anyone else. You gotdamn right!! Not only do the guest appearances blend so well with the theme, but also never do they sound out of place with the rest of the album. All have been a part of the enjoyment evolution and each sets forth their own unique qualities The one and only Prince Poetry comes through to trade verbal quips with the gifted one over a drum
pattern that would make Timbaland  jealous on “Copy Cats”. Everybody’s favorite group of lushes, Tha Liks bring their braggadocio to the table on the rambunctious “What U Sittin’ On?” Mr. Disrespectful himself, J-Zone, pops up with one of his seldom heard vocal appearances on the cock-strong “Take Care Of Business”. The two emcees trade verses oozing of ignorance over DM’s solid throwback production. Danger Mouse’s shining moment comes on the Pharcyde assisted “Medieval”. Combining voices stripped from an operacirca the medieval times with rock solid production, Danger Mouse catapults this work of art to must be heard status.

Ghetto Pop Life is to hip hop heads what ESPN Classic is to the nostalgic sports fan. A nod to an era before bling bling and Bentleys overran our youth’s thoughts, before today’s plastic thugs could even spell 9 millimeter, before The Source became so damn political driven and diluted. Jemini and Danger Mouse succeed in bringing you back to that era. They succeed so well in fact that if you are a hip-hop head and turn a deaf ear to Ghetto Pop Life you are doing
yourself a serious disservice.