Broken marriage chimes so sweet

The super group and its belittled brother the side project are by no means a new phenomenon, having enjoyed their heyday back in the super-groupy 1970s. But collaborations are coming back to the fore - look at Jack White’s Raconteurs and The Dead Weather, Them Crooked Vultures , Velvet Revolver, Monsters of Folk and The Last Shadow Puppets, to name a few.

With live music thriving, bands are touring together more, meeting at festivals and building attraction. Yeah, Dave and little Eric and Ron are sweet, talented, good-looking guys, good musicians, but it’s just the same faces and always it’s the same songs, with the same chords, the same recipes every night. Out on tour you meet someone new, someone who’s had many partners; they have exciting ideas that touch you in places you forgot existed, you feel alive again, excited, you want to have an album with this man. Start a new life together even.

That social mixing may be one of the factors behind the increased musical ménages and maybe that’s the story behind new super duo Broken Bells.

So it presumably happened for James Mercer of The Shins (though he is clearly a serial monogamist, with the Shins being a side project itself), who, after ditching his former dependents, has hooked up with the very talented Mr Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, half of Gnarls Barkley and ‘super producer’ of a number of well-regarded albums of the last few years. Together they have formed Broken Bells and released their eponymous début.

This seems quite a departure for Mercer from his previous territory but his voice and lyrics suit the new style well. The album has a downbeat and haunted atmosphere, laced with drama and the intricately clever beats that Danger Mouse’s fans love him for. But there is a great deal of variety, even eccentricity - the cheerily-haunting Hammond warble on Vaporize, the hand-clappy reminder that The Ghost Inside gives of Danger Mouse’s production of the previous Gorillaz album, or the breakdown in Mongrel Heart, which could very well provide the backing for the heartbreaking dénouement of a Mexican gangster flick. I'm a big fan of all this.



It may be because it’s the track I’ve heard most but my favourite is the album’s opener, The High Road. The beeps, bleeps and stretched and twisted honks conjure up images of a robot switched on for the first time, making its first steps out of the packaging as we hear its rudimentary ability to bust a groove quickly maturing into a breezy electro-beatbox. A passing Mercer takes the opportunity to sing over it with a slightly melancholy but generally encouraging ditty.

With a similar vocal delivery on this album at least to a late-era Brain Wilson, Mercer’s laidback mumble gave me some exciting miss-hearings, as ‘To Nietzsche’s arm’ and ‘come on and get the meat to mom’ sadly turned out to be ‘To each his own’ and ‘Come on and get the minimum’.

It is in a number of the lyrics in the early album tracks - in The High Road particularly - where its seems more than just over-eager interpretation from me to find the pair are talking about moving into a new liaison, away from former musical kin, possibly for good:

The high road is hard to find
A detour to your new life
Tell all of your friends goodbye

It’s too late to change your mind.