Album Review: Atlanta by Gnarls Barkley

Gnarls Barkley’s farewell names its dead, prays without expecting an answer, and rides the train until it stops. With the help of Danger Mouse, CeeLo bought enough life to fill a eulogy.

Courtesy of 10K Projects.

Two albums in two years, St. Elsewhere in 2006 and The Odd Couple in 2008, and then nothing. No announcement, no public split, just two people who stopped being Gnarls Barkley and went back to their own names. Danger Mouse spent the next stretch producing records for the Black Keys, Adele, A$AP Rocky, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and a half-dozen others with the kind of patience that turned his credit into a stamp of dependability. CeeLo Green had “Fuck You,” five Grammys, four seasons coaching on The Voice, multiple controversies that nearly buried him, solo records, and a Goodie Mob reunion. Both continued working. Neither needed this. Last year, they agreed to finish what they’d always called a trilogy, and Atlanta, named for the city where Green grew up and where Danger Mouse spent his teenage years at Redan High School in Stone Mountain, is that final installment.

Atlanta is not a backdrop here. On “Pictures,” CeeLo is an eighth-grader riding the MARTA alone from morning until the middle of the afternoon, kicked out of school every Friday by a principal who just told him to go. He stares out the window. He keeps score:

“One dead, one in jail, one’s a functioning addict.”

Wayne is still out there somewhere. Someone’s mom bought Mike a car. The cemeteries looked pretty from the train. The chorus rolls I just go, I just go, I just go until the train stops running, and the song doesn’t pause to grieve any particular loss because the losses are constant and they come through the window like weather. “Line Dance” casts the city limit as nothing but a line, half party instruction, half warning about being boxed in. Life getting shorter and the deep end of the water is right there. The comfort CeeLo offers is genuine. “Shawty if you happy, bitch, I just might be” is a real concession from a person who cannot guarantee his own mood. Atlanta produced that kind of honesty, where it’s conditional, warm, and unsentimental.

The album circles questions of God and dying without settling on a position, and CeeLo does not handle that like a philosopher. “Sorry” opens with an apology and then drops the bad news: your God is never coming, we’ve lost the war for peace, these are the dying days. Have fun before it’s too late, then give me a long kiss goodnight. On “Accept It,” the closer, he goes further:

“There ain’t gonna be no goddamn afterlife.”

“Ain’t you tired of being somebody’s fool?,” he asks, and then tells shiny happy people to clap their hands and give the devil a better dance while he got the chance, because heaven is out there on the dance floor tonight and this is all you get. Those two songs should be heard together. They say the same thing from slightly different distances, “Sorry” from pity, “Accept It” from defiance, and neither pretends the listener is going to be okay. “Turn Your Heart Back On” lays it out more plainly. Yesterday is dead, he wants to get so high he forgets he still has to die, he’d change it if he could but it hurts so good, and he’s staring at a television trying to cry. When the refrain hits, no one’s happy, it’s not fair, when I’m happy no one cares, it is not a complaint. It is a weather report. “Perfect Time” is the most unsettling track because it holds every option open at once:

“Please wake me up before you go
Hurry up and wait
Now run like the wind
Make your escape
But don’t you look back or you’ll turn to dust.”

The two tracks where CeeLo strips his own history bare are “Cyberbully (Yayo)” and “Boy Genius,” and they share a detail that hits harder for appearing in both places. The babysitter kept touching him, and now it makes sense. On “Boy Genius,” this is part of a longer catalog. His first-grade teacher flagged something wrong, the student counselor agreed, he had arguments with his imaginary friend, he dropped out and got a job, he’s at his mother’s grave wishing they’d laid him with her, plus his therapist says he’s making progress. “Cyberbully (Yayo)” runs the list differently. Almost on his hundred million, still thinking about killing, every line covered in yayo, uneducated but special, trading Teslas, dope in the dresser, maybe it’s the devil, maybe it’s the Lord, maybe it’s the cyborg inside him. He’s going to do the Michael Jackson drip, then he’s at his mother’s grave again.

Danger Mouse parks the production below CeeLo’s voice and trusts the words to do the work. The arrangements recall the analog grit of the first two Gnarls Barkley records without trying to modernize them, and the spare approach is the right call for material this frank. “Sweet Evil” is the one track that might have pushed further, with CeeLo declaring himself a god in some earthly form, torn by a tug of war, then calling the whole thing a love song at the end. The instrumentation holds a steady temperature when the lyric is practically begging to overheat, and the tension between those two impulses is the best thing about it. “The Be Be King” is the album’s kindest moment. CeeLo wants to be cheese grits and the pancake mix, the gas in your car, a good paying job, the face in the locket, the generator when the lights go out. He wants to stand with his hands in the air daring someone to pull the trigger. He wants to be compared to who he was yesterday, not anyone else. He wants you to live a little longer. It is the closest Atlanta gets to a plain-spoken declaration of love.

“Let Me Be” pleads for quiet, and means it. The song details the party has ended, everyone left, and all that remains is a beautiful picture of an unhappy family and a person who no one understands, requesting solitude without a timeline attached. “I Amnesia” traps someone in a bed they can’t climb out of, suspended in sweet nothing, asking if anybody will remember them when they come back alive. The sunlight makes them sit up. “Real talk,” CeeLo says, “does not have to rhyme.” And on “Tomorrow Died Today,” the sky is raining bullets, the chemtrails look like cocaine, the acid rain will fade their colors, because only in death are we all the same. A war of words where nobody won. He’s still staring up.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Pictures,” “Cyberbully (Yayo),” “Perfect Time”