Danger Mouse

Music review: Danger Mouse conquers “Rome” with Jack White and Norah Jones

By The Burg Staff on May. 25, 2011
By Matt Ashare

It’s remarkably rare, if not entirely unprecedented, for a producer to get top billing on an album. After all, Sir George Martin may have been the brains behind the board when the Beatles entered the studio in 1966, but you won’t find him mentioned anywhere on the cover of the album that emerged from those sessions — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Then again, Brian Joseph Burton, the artist known as Danger Mouse, is anything but your average producer. This past February, he won the “Best Producer” Grammy for his work on not one, not two, but three discs: the Black Keys’ gutbucket bluesy Brothers; the avant-indie collaboration Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present Dark Night of the Soul; and the self-titled alterna-pop debut by Broken Bells, a project Burton formed with the Shins’ frontman, James Mercer.
     Burton began producing and remixing back in ‘98, yet it wasn’t until he shocked the music world with the black-marketed The Grey Album in 2004 that the Danger Mouse franchise really took off. A bold, brilliant, and entirely illicit remix that took the naked vocal tracks from Jay-Z’s The Black Album and artfully set them to samples from the Beatles’ “White Album,” The Grey Album — initially recorded just “for friends” — quickly found its way online as a free download, where it went viral before anyone was applying epidemiological jargon to the Internet. It also popularized the DJ genre known as “mash-ups,” adding quite a bit of fuel to the already raging firestorm of controversy over the issue of “fair usage.” (Remember, this was long before you could legally download anything from the Beatles catalog, anywhere, much less the entire “White Album.”)
     Burton likely could have made a mint as a mash-up specialist, but he had bigger plans. Much bigger. A voracious omnivore with exquisite taste, he’s spent the last seven years racking up too many credits for me to list here, while blurring to the point of near irrelevance the distinction between “producer” and “artist.” With Damon Albarn, he helped perfect the pomo pop of the “virtual” band Gorillaz on 2005’s Demon Days, and followed-up with the ex-Blur frontman on The Good, the Bad & the Queen in ‘07. He partnered with rapper MF Doom as Dangerdoom in 2005 for the sampledelic The Mouse & the Mask, then went on to delve into more soulful hip-hop with Goodie Mob emcee Cee Lo Green as Gnarls Barkley in 2008. Let’s just say it’s no surprise Paste Magazine named Danger Mouse “Producer of the Decade” in 2009.
     The latest Danger Mouse foray took Burton all the way to Italy, where, sans samplers, he joined forces with Italian composer Daniele Luppi to create a vintage homage to the spaghetti western scores of Ennio Morricone and his lesser-known contemporaries. Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi Present: Rome was six years in the making (please, no jokes about Rome not being built in a day), in part because Burton and Luppi went to great lengths to track down the original orchestra and choir members from soundtracks to films like the 1966 Clint Eastwood classic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
     But Burton’s real masterstroke was recruiting ex-White Stripes frontman Jack White and sultry songstress Norah Jones to lay down vocals on six of the disc’s tracks. Their voices intertwine with sensual allure on the gorgeously mournful “The Rose With a Broken Neck,” lending dark mystery to simple lyrics like “A plow on the farm/A train on the track/The tracks on my arm/The train in a wreck.” Jones, for her part, hasn’t sounded as disarmingly seductive since her debut as she does against the undulating sway of guitars and strings of “Season’s Trees.” And White’s bluesy swagger animates the spare, acoustic “Two Against One.”
     Without Jones and White, Rome might have still succeeded as a faux soundtrack to a non-existent film. But the six non-instrumental tracks create a compelling EP within an album that would otherwise have merely been a vanity project as genre exercise. And that’s just not how Danger Mouse rolls.
Contact Matt at mattattheburg@gmail.com with tips about any local and/or regional music events.