Stars: 4/5
Karen O and Danger Mouse find their soul on “Lux Prima” to succeed in an unlikely collaboration between two of the most passionate artists in the music scene.
No one in the world saw this pairing coming, with both coming from vastly different backgrounds. Karen O is the lead singer of one of independent music’s most influential acts in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, while Danger Mouse continues to be one of the most gifted and thorough producers in genres that run the gamut from rap to rock and back again, from being one-half of Gnarls Barkley to curating the “Baby Driver” soundtrack.
And yet their fusion sounds so just and so right that it’s a wonder why the world didn’t see this union sooner. The album is 40 minutes of bliss, a savory experienced laced with the stuff of dreams. The mixture of Danger Mouse’s restrained drums and synths with Karen O’s emphatic blue-eyed soul is almost uncanny in the notion that it sticks from the very first song.
What a first song that is. The titular track and lead-off for the album, a 9-minute barnstormer, twists and turns at its own pace, evoking a feeling of psychedelia. With numerous beat switch-ups, Karen O guides the listener through a constantly morphing beat laid down by rock-solid percussion and synths that seem to vanish into thin air.
“No drops in the glass,” Karen O croons. “No one listening / No sound / Nobody but you.”
The tracks on display rarely sound in the same ballpark, a testament to both Danger Mouse’s versatility and Karen O’s adaptable vocals. To the stripped-back catharsis of “Ministry” to the slow motion beauty that lies within “Drown,” there is rarely a moment that doesn’t please. You can even notice the callbacks to the two’s respective careers — with “Redeemer” featuring those Spaghetti western guitars that made “Crazy” so popular all those years ago.
The two also strike a midline between musical ambition and creating something that’s palatable. One only needs to look at the two pop-centric songs that hold the center of the album together, “Turn the Light” and “Woman,” to see that killer hooks don’t have to be in a substandard song.
“Turn the Light” sounds like a warped, forgotten 45 from the age of Motown, with a slick funky bassline gluing a swirl of synths and Karen O’s heavenly voice together. It’s like watching a disco through a broken lens, a kind of shattered beauty.
Quite possibly the best showcase of the two’s powers lies in “Woman,” an anthem that screams that a woman will not be denied and a perfect accompaniment to the times in which we live. Karen O’s vocals reach an unfathomable high here, as she screeches — well, as menacing as Karen O can sound, anyway — with a passion and intensity unrivaled.
The beauty of “Lux Prima” lies in its unexpected joining of two well-established musical titans and the incredible success that their sound yields. A perfectly listenable journey that, aside from a few moments of dragging, will hopefully be replicated in the future. Sometimes you can’t tell what something’s going to sound like until you give it a go — and here is the perfect testing of a hypothesis that we never knew we wanted answered.
