Cee-Lo and Brian Burton's mutual appreciation of Portishead, helping to foster their shared vision and the subsequent Gnarls Barkley collaboration, has been noted in the New York Times Magazine article on Danger Mouse and elsewhere in the press. The similarities between Gnarls Barkley and Portishead, though, have not been dealt with clearly or thoroughly. Let's begin with a brief diversion: the electronic sounds of contemporary popular music - often imitating drums, strings, and horns - are in a roundabout way samples, similar to those making up most of the non-vocal parts of Gnarls Barkley or Portishead. Original sources were studied - the frequencies they send into the air measured scientifically - and then recreated by machines, albeit with sound waves much simpler in their rise and fall, giving the results the "fake" or "artificial" sound many listeners raised on Rock dislike (though perhaps not anymore, given the assembly-line-like "modern" Rock of the post-Pearl Jam era). The pop musicians who instead take up the Hip Hop artist's approach have thus made a wise move: going straight to the source, so to speak, restores the presence - literally and in terms of their timbral complexity - of common elements of the modern pop song: the Funk-derived beat, the strings adding sentiment or melodrama, the quick injection of instrumentation or "effects" filling up space.

Besides Portishead, another obvious example to point to is Beck. A precedent even more revealing, though, is the work of Mike Ladd, especially Father Divine, released in 2005, and the Majesticons album, Beauty Party, released in 2003; the former features singing as much as rapping; and even the latter, like all of Ladd's records, refuses to confine the vocalist to an either-or position, following the logic Cee-Lo put into words: "rap is just a cadence." Beauty Party is of the present: the Majesticons, doing battle with their rivals, the Infesticons [the album released under that moniker, Gun Hill Road (2000), is another essential record from this artist surely deserving more attention] strive to push Hip Hop in the direction of Bacchanalian pop, the irony of the concept/project being that, while they play the bad guys to the Infesticons' heroes of the "underground," the Majesticons (the artists) make a record that, if it reached the proverbial masses the Majesticons (the fictional characters) hope to win to their side, would surely broaden the range of possibilities in contemporary pop music. Father Divine is of the past: while at least some of the record concerns Father Divine, the religious leader who proclaimed himself to be a god, founded communes based upon celibacy, and reached the height of his influence in 1930's New York, more of it consists of Ladd recalling his youth of the early 1980's, when Rap was just one part of a "new music," post-Rock [in the original definition of that term] then being foretold by optimistic artists and listeners. Besides the vocals, the instrumentals defy the very notion of genre; furthermore, the record is on the Reach Out International Records (ROIR) label, despite its continued existence more the stuff of legend than present, cold fact - once again, we look back to a time when, for at least an enlightened minority, the appropriate reaction to conservative backlash was further radicalization. Nonetheless, the example of Father Divine's difficulties with both the law and his followers cautions against any sentimental nostalgia. The realization of one's own god-like state, which ideally comes with the creative process, too often (as it did with Punk) fails to inspire others to embark on a similar path, as post-industrial society leads us instead to revere those smart and daring enough to refuse consumerism, thus reinforcing the status quo. After all, at the onset of the 1980's, the "hot" antidote to the Cold War then rearing its ugly godhead once again was more likely to be The Knack than ESG.

With Beck, Mike Ladd, and Gnarls Barkley, the point is not to exclude electronic sounds for the sake of a sampler's world-view, which is merely a happy idiot's embrace of the consumerist dystopia: acting as if all original recordings of sound have already been made, the artist's role being that of the rebellious consumer continually reconfiguring aural documents of what increasingly seems like a bygone era. No, the point is to keep all avenues open; let both the music one hears in his head and the results of experimentation with all sorts of tools dictate the course the music takes. The bright, ebullient soundscape concocted by the iconoclastic Danger Mouse on St. Elsewhere is no surprise then. Still, Danger Mouse's half of the project does not overwhelm Cee-Lo's, an obvious point to any listener, but perhaps not to those who have only read the New York Times Magazine article noted above, wherein Burton posits the work of film directors as the model he emulates, because only with them does he see the kind of mastery over a project he'd like for himself. However, it must be said the analogy of singers to actors is both specious and misplaced. Musicians of Burton's ilk already have the option of complete control over their projects. Before Danger Mouse, there was Pelican City, Burton's solo alias. If he wants to make pop music that is similarly entirely his own creation, he can sing songs himself. Given that he has not, when he discuss Gnarls Barkley, we discuss Cee-Lo. After all, the auteur theory of film we are drawing upon here falls apart when the director is not also the screenwriter. And the screenwriter here, so to peak, is Cee-Lo, with his songs revolving around his and Burton's unifying concept of insanity. If anything, too many of these tracks pass too quickly, the singer not given enough room to stretch out and digress, especially toward the end of the record as it limps to an anti-climax.

And so, not St. Elsewhere but rather two other records released this year have occupied much of my listening-time of late: Geoff Reacher's Avec Reacher C'Est Plus Sur and Excepter's Alternation. Reacher's is surely a pop record, like those made by Gnarls Barkley, Beck, and Ladd. It will, nonetheless, strike tender ears oddly: a singer infused with the varied currents of American popular song, trained well (by Dave Van Ronk, of all people!) in the plucking and picking of the strings of the guitar he wields, all melding into the bed of beats, samples, and synths underneath. The ebb and flow of electro-acoustic elements, which - to keep the lines sufficiently blurred - includes the over-dubbed guitar parts interacting with whichever one the listener decides is the primary, as well as, to a lesser extent, manipulation of the voice, gives the record at times a headphones-required complexity. Still, the drama here lies more in how this music grew out of Reacher's approach to live performance and in the charming mix of bravado and self-deprecation on display in the lyrics. In short, from Van Ronk who taught him to the Rap/Hip Hop artists who inspire him, Reacher covers a lot of ground, and the playfulness of his approach makes the experience a celebratory one.

This singer-songwriter with a guitar does not employ electronics in a lame effort to modernize the ancient art of song, or as a gimmick, but to become a one-man band, like another of his inspirations, Hasil Adkins. Those who have witnessed Reacher's numerous gigs in Athens over these past few years when he has called the city home know the joy they bring. The performances - the improvising, the venturing forth (along the edge of a cliff) - are uncanny in their life-like-ness, their transparency. In an era when Indie bands appear on Austin City Limits and Improvised Electro-Acoustic artists are escorted around the world like diplomats, few artists so completely part of popular-music traditions, as Reacher is, would seem so out-of-place performing in our standard forums; and few experimental artists have an approach as open-ended, likely to fall apart completely, not painting one's self into a corner, as he does. At Athens's smaller venues, house parties, and informal performance spaces, we have gotten to know these songs, but only bare outlines, as Reacher continually hones them, never aiming to replicate the "final" versions on this record (different, if only slightly, from those on last year's "You Like My Song" EP); new variations always come forth, the creative process put on display in all its messiness.

As for those lyrics... the album begins with the singer referring himself in the third person: "Geoff Reacher, the lonesome engineer," "a man well aware of his worth" - indeed, "you like [his] song." Yet, just as much as this Rap-influenced self-boasting, the subject of the album is the narrator's love for another - or, at least, the very act of proclaiming such love. The desire for a romance, a partner in life, is driven by - if not inexorably tied up with - the fear of death, end-times arriving. The singer suddenly says, "we'll be dead in no time"; there are "hearses circling your house"; though your "eyes are closed, doesn't mean you're dead." Love is the "feeling I can ride to the grave," content with and certain of at least one thing in life. By the end of the record, a necromancer regales us with a swaggering, vengeful song - certain he "won't get cancer." Apparently, all the talk of one's own worth and one's recognition of another's comes to naught, and other means of shaping the future are sought out. [Both Reacher's record and St. Elsewhere have songs sung from the perspective of necromancers, though the Gnarls Barkley is more about necrophilia, sadly enough more reflective of the social context, as 2006 was the year Americans finally grew tired of George W Bush getting off on the proverbial dead corpse of US imperialism.] Indeed, after the myth-making cheap-wine-grandeur of nearly every song on the record, Avec Reacher ends with "Customer Service," where the narrator is just one service-industry minion among many, in Athens, Austin, New York... wherever young artists on the make congregate to take on the bizarre dual task of timeless artistic pursuits and piss-ant day jobs.

With Excepter as with Reacher, sampling - to the extent it is employed - is of course not the modus operandi, or selling point, or preferred means of composition; it is just another facet of an open-ended approach to electronic music-making devices. Indeed, the Hip Hop-derived common understanding of "sampling" - that it involves the appropriation of another artist's work - acts as an unrecognized intellectual hegemon blocking greater awareness of how most artists use the devices known as samplers. But we'll return to the issue of these tools' usage in a moment. First... Alternation is the second manifestation of the band's renewed sense of direction and purpose, and new confidence as performers, after the quintet version gave way to the current quartet; it follows Sunbomber: now, we do have a selling point - that Sunbomber was recorded in one hour, while Alternation required one year. That one hour took place July 9, 2005, the day before the new line-up first played live, at the gig I noted below. As Sunbomber, despite its relatively quick production, was still not a live performance, but rather featured the same editing of improvised performances characterizing all of Excepter's records, Alternation does not simply take the opposite position, as a meticulously crafted pop record. Instead, the interaction between improvisation and composition, performance for others and performance at home for one's self or friends, is a fundamental "subject matter" here.

Alternation is a double LP; as such, under discussion here we have four short LP's, none reaching the 40-minute mark. Confronted by the decline of the album, to the point where perhaps for the first time since the early 1960's the single song (if even an Internet download instead of a single per se) predominates, these artists stage an unwitting protest. Each of these also flows like an album, a continuity, so that listening to individual tracks is not satisfactory (thus, the irony of "Crazy"'s success). Alternation's side A at least manifests John Fell Ryan's remark in part 2 of our correspondence that vocals are central to the record. "Ice Cream Van" and "The Rock Stepper" venture into songwriting, the former a myriad of instrumental and vocal melodies mixed into a complex web of other elements, the latter overwhelmed by a vocal refrain with different words at each reoccurrence, the singer starting anew every time; and a mantra-like synth part, which in its varied repetitions serves as a sort of commentary on the quiet influence of minimalist aesthetics on electronic pop music; even as the underlying bass line and stilted beat provide about as regular of a rhythm one will find in Excepter's music. The result with both tracks is a queasy yet (when listening closely) hypnotic stasis. In between, "Lypse," recorded live from a gig at Northsix in Brooklyn, features a wrenching word-forming performance from Ryan on top of beats stuttering, and melodies and textures fluttering and sparkling, but not violently; this clatter which runs through most of the track is hard to pin down - the lines of demarcation not seen whole, a splattering of directions.

Side B allows the listener to relax some. "The Ladder" is Excepter at its simplest, its most sublime; a second live track, "If I Were You," exudes a laid-back cool, perfect for automobile-listening, while "Whirl Wind" is an electronic recreation of those moments in a Sun Ra concert where all the players collectively made a "joyful noise." Sides C and D follow more closely upon Throne and Self Destruction. Once past "(The Pipes)" - supposedly performed by the building where many of Excepter's recordings have taken place - we have four tracks, "Knock Knock," "Apt. Living," "Op Pop," and "'Back Me Up' (Show)," bringing the record to the close - appropriately enough, as they also serve as the pinnacle of Excepter's oeuvre to this point. Listening to these tracks, I think again of the new level of comfort and dexterity certain contemporary music artists have attained with electronic instruments. Those of us raised on Academic masters of the distant past, and pioneers of digital dissonance of the near past, cannot help but make too much of the simplicity of the electronics and concrete effects found in some of the best contemporary music: notably, the undulating waves of delay coating the music of Animal Collective, the persistent backwards vocals on The Fiery Furnaces's Bitter Tea, and the ghostly echoes of voices in Excepter's early work. In doing so, we make the mistake these artists are avoiding: thinking of electronics and effects as fancy, new embellishments upon - or curt rejections of - the Rock-band core, and as such required to surprise the listener with a new sound he has never heard before. One example: in the class on electro-acoustic music I took in college, the professor warned against the simple use of the "backwards" effect, because it was too obvious and did not impel the listener's interest. Another: the constant rush of Experimental Electronica artists toward new and different ways of mining their machines for "glitches," as if any electronic sounds not more "modern" and dissonant than what came before were to be discarded. But, what if, when listening to Bitter Tea, we treat the backwards vocals as different vocals, rather than manipulated vocals? That is to say, what if we ignore our own knowledge of what was done there electronically? Let our guard down a little, and cease these pathetic efforts of ours to avoid looking like suckers. No, sullen Indie Rocker, bitter Rock critic, those are not backwards vocals, they are just vocals. And those are not echoes, but other voices. Not addenda, but the substance itself. New instruments.

These four tracks are similarly effective - in the use of synthesizers, drum machines, samplers, and treated vocals. "Knock Knock"'s syncopated House beat (which I suppose makes it not a House beat at all...) takes the listener through three distinct aural spaces, each more confined, only to be overtaken by a hand-drum beat, naturally leading us into "Apt. Living," which evinces a Buddha-like detachment, suitable as musical accompaniment to a large number of environments and circumstances. The vocals on these tracks are similar to those on Throne (except its first track, "Jrone (Three)"), floating, roaring or mumbling along in the background. In some cases, the vocals are among the many elements which I only noticed after several listens. Indeed, despite being largely kept in the background, some searing vocals make themselves heard later in "'Back Me Up' (Show)," by which point a brash, driving bass line has risen to the surface gradually along with synth parts alternately playful and siren-like. At first, vocals are more prominent on "Op Pop," but they give way; the real stars of the track are the bright spring- and bell-like sounds which gloriously grow in intensity, a reverie forming a pointillistic whole.