Broken Bells

James Mercer and Brian Burton are spectacularly unlikely bedfellows. Mercer is the singer and guitarist of wistful US West Coast jangle-rockers the Shins, while Burton, under his alter ego of Danger Mouse, is an inspired hip-hop producer and electronic music alchemist who has produced albums for Beck and Gorillaz and also forms half of surrealist pop subversives Gnarls Barkley. This profoundly odd couple first hooked up backstage at a 2004 summer festival, and when their respective bands went on hiatus four years later decided to unite as Broken Bells. The first fruit of this bizarre union is an imminent eponymous debut album that sees Burton ladle his techno savvy beats over Mercer's classicist rock with patchy but often beguiling results. Melancholic and brooding, the album is an understated and initially underwhelming affair but gains a visceral power live. Backed here by four auxiliary musicians, Broken Bells play the album in full and in sequence, producing a mesmerising show despite the fact that it largely lacks the Shins' Byrds-like soaring choruses or Danger Mouse's sense of pop mischief. Burton is low profile, skulking around the back of the stage on drums and occasional keyboards, as Mercer sings words of loss and dislocation in a fetching falsetto. If there is a theme to this singular project, it is existential dread: on Sailing to Nowhere Mercer laments that he is "dead inside" while the magisterial, morose Citizen finds him demanding "So what's it all about?" They lighten the tone, marginally, for an exquisitely yearning encore cover of Neil Young's Don't Let It Bring You Down and, by their restrained standards, a closing psychedelic wig-out on Tommy James and the Shondells' 1969 US No 1 Crimson and Clover. The pair claim Broken Bells is an ongoing concern, not a one-off side-project: it will be fascinating to see where they take it next.