With their latest album The Odd Couple, the duo known as Gnarls Barkley begins a trend of naming very good albums after defunct TV series (their first album being St. Elsewhere.) The Odd Couple is aptly named. Cee-Lo, the rotund soulful singer of the group, provides a stark visual contrast to the rail-thin DJ Danger Mouse. Visuals be damned though, because musically the duo is a genre-defying powerhouse.
Unless you were in a coma you probably got sucked into the craze that was “Crazy.” With its window-shaking bass lines and powerful chorus, “Crazy” had all the elements to be a pop success and establish a fan-base for Gnarls Barkley. Cee-Lo and Danger don’t play it safe by giving us more of the same with The Odd Couple. As good sophomore albums should be, it has a more fluid, cohesive sound with some surprise elements thrown in for good measure.
“Would Be Killer” alarmingly starts off with the sound of cocking guns and ends as abruptly as a life would at the hands of said killer. “Open Book” focuses more on Danger’s beats than Cee-Lo’s wail (there’s no limelight stealing here.) The first single to drop from the album, “Run,” kicks optimism in the teeth with a quasi-apocalyptic message: “When you see me come and run/ before you see what I’m running from/ no time for question asking/ time is passing by/ you can’t win child/ we’ve all tried to// you’ve been lied to.”
The Odd Couple has a slower tempo to it though, with "Run" being the exception, suggesting that the duo may have been feeling melancholic when writing the album. Melancholy morphs into apathy in "Whatever" in which Cee-Lo half-whines, half-sings what everyone feels when they just want to forget everything. "Said fuck me/ well fuck you too.../whatever/ I don't care." Although Cee-Lo's problems may be worth forgetting, this album is not.
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