Broken Bells is a side project featuring James Mercer and Danger Mouse. You may know Mercer as the front man from the indie pop band The Shins, who broke into mainstream pop culture in 2004 with two songs featured on the Garden State (2004) soundtrack (produced by Zach Braff.) Braff was also the featured actor in the film. The soundtrack went on to win the Grammy in 2005 for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. The Shins last album, Wincing the Night Away (2007), soared to #2 in the U.S. Billboard Charts.

Danger Mouse is mostly known for his production work but is the number two guy and the brains behind Gnarls Barkley. He has also produced other well-known artist such as Beck, The Gorillaz, The Good, the Bad, and the Queen, and the Black Keys. Their Broken Bells album is the second time Danger Mouse and James Mercer have collaborated but this is the first album they have done together.

The album starts off with great promise…

“High Road” and “Vaporize” are upbeat, well-packaged songs that don’t stray from what we’ve all come to love about The Shins. Listeners immediately notice the infectious pop melodies and catchy sing along lyrics like “it’s too late to change your mind.” Mercer’s lyrics play on the anxious uncertainties of life and reflect on what we have done with our time on Earth. Knowing that it all will end some day, Mercer challenges our thought lives and gives us an understated call to action. He does this in a style that is all his own, yet rooted in a foundation originally constructed by The Beach Boys.

The production of the album is nothing shy of what you have come to expect if you have been listening to the work of anything by Danger Mouse. It’s effortless in it’s feeling, yet actually quite complex, with layer-upon-layer of ambient sounds. Drum lines and vocal sections often change from being bright and bubbly, to flat and canned.

It’s a jarring production process that adds to the success of this project. Mercer’s vocals find little accompaniment on Broken Bells, outside of choruses, but are swamped with so many effects and so much production prowess that listeners are never worn out or bored.

Mercer drives his vocals lines up and down with melodies that act as the paint strokes to this album’s textured canvas. “The Ghost Inside” features him singing in an unusually high range that challenges what we’ve come to think of when we hear his complex styling. This is where the album comes into it’s own a little bit more. Broken Bells features less guitar work from Mercer then his past projects and more keys, beats, and strings. For example, “Sailing To Nowhere” has an outro that just features the strings. In “Citizen,” Mercer exclaims, “You’ve got me wrong!” as this song picks up and down with another sing along anthem that seems to be continually anchoring the album.

By the time you get to “October,” you’re used to the project’s sing along anthem that anchors the album throughout. Starting off with a blisteringly dream-like slide section before it busts into a hi-hat snare 4/4 that we’ve been accustomed to so far. It’s the kind direction that feels more like an okie-doke and less of a musical and creative divergence. And while the song is still well packaged, by this point the album’s redundancies are starting to show themselves. ; I think this is where a two-man production has its challenges. Mercer still carries the project well with the tension in his voice and the depth of his writing, but with “Mongrel Heart” following a similar pattern, it’s hard to say this album will have much staying power in my 6-disc CD changer. (That’s right, I don’t have an iPod.)

Mercer and Mouse seem to get in and out pretty smoothly, with an album that clocks in around 36 minutes. You can expect a few tracks to find their way into a couple Cadillac/McDonalds commercials, as these two are no strangers to the world of endorsement deals, but if you’ve heard the single, you’ve heard the best parts of what this album has to offer. With very little overall wow factors to show for this project, Broken Bells will probably go unnoticed by most of the mainstream. There is still enough to love for any die-hard Shins fan, but very few sustaining qualities.

If you’re new to the world of The Shins and Danger Mouse, get your feet wet with some earlier projects like Wincing the Night Away by The Shins, or St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley.