Broken Bells feeling a sense of liberation with 'After the Disco'

1/5

I didn’t speak to the young woman sitting next to me at Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Fonda gig in February. Honestly, she’d annoyed me all night ¿ chatting with a friend during the first part of the show, singing along a bit too loudly to “Higgs Boson Blues,” texting. I was busy dying over Nick Cave. She didn’t seem to be. Then, in the first song of the encore, the Bad Seeds started the driving pound of “From Her to Eternity.” It’s one of my favorite songs. Stunned, I never thought I’d hear it performed live. Next to me, the woman screamed. She was as overjoyed as I. As she bellowed, she noticed my joy and our eyes locked. We broke into huge smiles, two strangers connected by the thrill of holy communion. And in that moment I forgave her everything.

— Randall Roberts (Noel Vasquez / Getty Images)

2/5

Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Britney Spears never worked harder for our attention. It all seemed to kick off with Cyrus’ deliciously trashy train wreck of a performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. Between the incessant tongue-wagging, crotch-grabbing and foam finger antics, she effortlessly hijacked Robin Thicke’s song of summer and spawned countless think pieces on sexuality and culture appropriation. Then there was the follow-up -- the interviews where she skydived, partied and got tattoos, the performances next to libidinous teddy bears and latex-clad little people, the video where she rode construction equipment in the nude. Cyrus relentlessly twerked her way into the zeitgeist and it worked, steering the conversation with her transition from Disney princess to urban pop provocateur.

— Gerrick D. Kennedy (Charles Sykes / Invision / Associated Press)

3/5

Ocean barely looked at the cameras when he performed “Forrest Gump” onstage during the Grammys that night. It was a disaster by most accounts ¿ the singer was nervous, slightly off-key and withdrawn, looking like an afterthought in an otherwise choreographed concept piece. Closing his eyes, he forced out the lyrics about lust and longing from an album that had already been intensely scrutinized for its same-sex love references. But in a year where bombastic attention grabs ruled, it was a rare moment when vulnerability and true fallibility couldn’t be buffed and shined into market-savvy spectacle. Out of place and heartbreaking, it was a reminder of why we fell for Ocean in the first place.

— Lorraine Ali (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

4/5

I tracked down the woman who inspired Jimmy Webb’s 1968 hit song “MacArthur Park,” his high school sweetheart, Suzy Horton, in Tucson for a story I was working on. We talked about the romantic relationship she and Webb had when both were living near L.A.’s MacArthur Park. Webb had recently recorded his own version of the song (actor Richard Harris had made it a hit back in the day), so I took the liberty of playing Horton the advance copy. She sat in her kitchen, listening to the composer sing his now-classic pop epic. To watch the mist form in her eyes and see her mouth the words as Webb sang his lyrics about the girl “in the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave on the ground around your knees” was a moment I’ll never forget, one that demonstrated once more the irrefutable power of music to speak from, and for, the heart like no other art form.

— Randy Lewis (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

5/5

Recording artist Lorde performs onstage during the Grammy nominations at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on December 6, 2013. (Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images)

By Mikael Wood

Feb. 5, 2014 4:30 PM PT

Danger Mouse had his heart set on a glimpse of Jupiter.

On a recent evening, the sonic mastermind of L.A.’s Broken Bells was standing in line at the Griffith Observatory, waiting to peer through the giant Zeiss telescope there. As closing time approached, though, an attendant announced that anyone still outside the telescope dome wasn’t likely to get the chance that night.

Danger Mouse didn’t budge.

The vast expanse of outer space — specifically as viewed from the observatory — served as an important source of inspiration for the new Broken Bells album, “After the Disco.” Released Tuesday, when it zoomed quickly to No. 1 on iTunes, the disc is the second full-length from the two-man supergroup that pairs Danger Mouse, known for his production work with acts such as the Black Keys and Beck, and singer James Mercer of the popular indie-rock band the Shins.

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“It’s kind of freeing to look up and think about how small we are,” Danger Mouse (born Brian Burton) said as he stood on the roof deck beneath a star-speckled sky. The producer remembered visiting the spot with Mercer and Jacob Gentry, who directed a series of short films, set to music from “After the Disco,” in which actors Kate Mara and Anton Yelchin play a couple of lonely looking astronauts.

“You realize,” he added, “that it doesn’t really matter what we all do.”

A welcome sense of liberation flows through Broken Bells’ new album, the follow-up to the band’s self-titled 2010 debut. On that record, which sold 425,000 copies and spawned an alternative-rock radio hit in “The High Road,” Mercer and Danger Mouse came across like meticulous studio scientists, splicing together disparate styles — slick synth-pop, spiky post-punk, sweeping spaghetti-western movie music — for songs that sparkled but sometimes lacked feeling.

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They’re looser and livelier on “After the Disco,” which swings even as Mercer chews over his worries about global warming or being abandoned by a lover.

“You gotta give it up,” he sings in the slyly funky “Control,” “You lost control ‘cause nothing stays around too long.”

Over drinks at a bar near Griffith Park, where the band repaired after being turned away finally from the Zeiss, Mercer said he felt more relaxed making the new album than he did “Broken Bells,” his first significant project outside the Shins.

“I was kind of nervous going into that one,” the singer said. “I felt like I had to prove myself to my bandmates and my friends. And to you,” he told Danger Mouse, a serial collaborator whose other projects include Gnarls Barkley (with singer Cee Lo Green) and a role as producer on U2’s next album.

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“This time, I didn’t have to live up to something,” Mercer said. “It was so laid-back.”

The two wrote songs from scratch in the studio, surrounded by instruments and recording gear. Danger Mouse recalled that “Medicine,” a slinky new wave cut that echoes the Cure, began with a beat he’d programmed to subtly alter a live drummer’s groove.

“Then we just went off that and started messing around,” he said.

Allusions to other music crop up constantly throughout “After the Disco,” as in the Duran Duran-ish “Perfect World” and “Holding on for Life,” in which Mercer nails Barry Gibb’s breathy falsetto. Yet Broken Bells frames them cleverly.

“Danger Mouse really brings it on this record,” said Jason Bentley, who’s had the group on his tastemaking “Morning Becomes Eclectic” radio show on KCRW-FM (89.9). “He’s such a thoughtful curator of ideas and sounds and influences. You feel like you’re hearing these parts of pop culture stirred up in a new way.”

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Even with “After the Disco” finished and in stores, that stirring continues. Last month, Mercer and Danger Mouse were rehearsing with several other musicians in preparation for a North American tour that’s set to kick off Feb. 28. (They’re on the bill for April’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif.)

For Broken Bells, presenting their new songs in concert means translating them from the studio, where virtually anything is possible, to the stage, where a band’s range is limited by what can be played (mostly) by hand.

This week, the group provided a possible preview of its live approach with an appearance on “Late Show With David Letterman” in which it covered the Beatles’ “And I Love Her” while playing along with a sample of Ringo Starr’s drumming from “I Am the Walrus.”

At the bar, Danger Mouse said, “We’ve gotten ourselves into some dilemmas,” referring with a laugh to some hard-to-reproduce material from “After the Disco.” “But it’s fun to figure this stuff out.”

“And it’s enjoyable to bring it to people — to communicate,” said Mercer.

“We’re all just looking to relate,” Danger Mouse said. “I mean, nobody wants to be alone in the world, right?”

mikael.wood@latimes.com