The Odd Couple

Since Gnarls Barkley jumped into everyone's consciousness on the back of a single called "Crazy", would you forgive me the groaning joke if I said their follow-up sounded a little like someone prescribed mood stabilizers? That's the gripe you'll probably hear from most people: The Odd Couple is flatter, in both directions. The joy of this duo's debut was a kind of erratic, anything-goes lightning-bottling; its chintzy, slapdash qualiti es were more than made up for by the number of bottles containing honest-to-god scraps of actual lightning. Hit the big time on the strength of one of those, though, and the world has big-time demands. It was inevitable that these two would have to fight past their idiosyncrasies (producer Danger Mouse's short attention span, singer Cee-Lo's ease with throwing vocals together on the fly) and deliver something more focused, something that doesn't require so much sorting through. They've done that, to an extent-- not by any huge, transformative leap, but a little. And much like your average SSRI, it means less of the unpredictable magic and the sideways song-notions that sold the first album.

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