"Nobody wants to be themselves"

I'm not convinced that the Gnarls Barkley album is great -- yet -- but I'm willing to be. This collection of tunelets, aborted soundscapes, interrupted jokes, and real songs evokes that smell of midnight-in-the-perfect-world ether of prime DJ Shadow, only it's not so mysterious. At its worst it's rather gimmicky (the curtain parts when "Transformer" turns into a lost Andre 3000 track from The Love Below and "Go-Go Gadget Gospel" keens like Basement Jaxx).

A narrative of sorts unfolds: a character with a warped sense of humor struggles to maintain a sense of equilibrium; it's whistling in the dark, and one of the few times that an audio experience captures that sense of suspension before a thought is vocalized. Often the thoughts are contradictory for their own sake, like telling yourself that 2+2=5 to adduce your ability to escape the boredom of logic. He has to rummage through his trunk of discarded identities first. I sense no angst. Like Prince and Green Gartside, Cee-lo questions God and language because a girl dumped his ass (admitting that "Basically I'm complicated" on "Who Cares?" verges on caddishness). Only on "Necromancer" does Cee-Lo make explicit the link between The Girl-as-source-material and The Girl-who-done-me-wrong: she's a nexus between those sadomasochistic blues tropes and the "neo necro" hocus pocus in which producer Danger Mouse envelops them. It's a troubling song, not least because Cee-Lo's reaction to The Girl's overdose has more in common with Rick James than Robert Johnson. Even creepier is the woozy "Smiley Faces," in which Cee-Lo can't figure out why The Girl is so damn happy all the time, despite his shit. He envies her but can't bring himself to emulate her -- not yet.

No caveats about "Crazy," possibly the weirdest song to hit the Billboard Top 10 this millenium.