Album Review: Broken Bells Sail Triumphantly Into the Blue

Image Courtesy of Consequence of Sound

By Dean Robbins

In the eight years since the last Broken Bells album, a lot has happened to its duo James Mercer and Danger Mouse. Mercer’s main band The Shins released their fifth LP Heartworms in 2017 and their classic debut Oh, Inverted World celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2021. Danger Mouse aka Brian Burton has released two albums (one with Karen O and another just this year with Black Thought), produced nine, and won a Grammy out of five nominations. 2014, the release year of the last Broken Bells album After the Disco, was arguably the height of Burton’s career. He was coming off the mega-hit of The Black Keys’ El Camino which was nominated for four Grammy Awards. In 2014, he would also produce U2’s infamously disseminated Songs of Innocence album. Within a few years after that, he would work on Adele’s 25, helped launch the career of Michael Kiwanuka, and bring Red Hot Chili Peppers back into the conversation. Into the Blue, Broken Bells’ third album, is the work of two masters. Into the Blue is so good that it reminds you of what truly great music should sound like. Despite a complete command of craft, the lyricism is full of doubt creating a beautifully brutal contrast. 

The title track, which opens the album, is surprisingly elegiac. It sounds like something that would conclude the album with a drifting repetitive verse closing the track. The lyrics seem to point to the nature of a creative drive: sometimes it cannot be quelled while other times “you fall into the blue, then it’s gone”. In a way, Mercer and Burton are both providing an explanation for their long follow-up time and crafting a mission statement. We are all here together, for reasons and ways not entirely clear, to create something beautiful. 

The second track “We’re Not in Orbit Yet…” was also the first of three singles, released in June of this year. As is often the case with the band, this song correlates creativity with love. The title points to a necessity to push fearlessly into the unknown to reach the skies in a relationship. At the same time, it is about allowing ourselves to push our own creative limits for something ever more beautiful. 

Track four “Love on the Run”, surprisingly for the band, has the piano front and center in a melancholy soul ballad about a failing relationship. The topic is also tackled in the heavy “Saturdays”. Mercer cries out to be saved from inauthenticity and to truly fall in love. Our lives are brief and there is only so much time to dally around. Then of course, “Love on the Run” is followed by the 80s synth-pop unrequited love ballad “One Night”.

Broken Bells put a heavy emphasis on their novel combination of electronic and acoustic elements. Some songs like “We’re Not in Orbit Yet…” play like space rock epics while others like “Invisible Exit” play closer to a folk ballad. The latter song, the album’s third, is reminiscent of Blaze Foley’s classic “Clay Pigeons” with an almost immediately doomed hope for the future. Every intention is balanced with a sobering realization of one’s capacity for failure. The Broken Bells’ lyric “Soon as I…get my head on straight” is easily compared to Foley’s “and start talkin’ again when I know what to say”. 

The seventh track “Forgotten Boy”, which almost seems to sample Quantic’s haunting “Time is the Enemy”, sees Mercer give advice to a “forgotten boy” about a withdrawal from drugs (“the pain is all healing”), love (“trust in time you’ll be jilted again”), or both. Track Eight “The Chase” pulls another double entendre between love and the desire for success. The lyric “thorn in the side” echoes the exact same double entendre Morrisey evoked in The Smiths’ “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side”. The “chase” for love or fame can keep going on but one is never fast enough, or the destination is never good enough. On the album’s final track “Fade Away”, the dreamlike ignorance of youth in the face of mortality and desolation is lamented. In the end, the only choice is to either ignore reality and emotion or let oneself be destroyed (“fade away…fade away…fade away”, the final verse of the album).

Mercer’s vocals perfectly flow through the synths of Danger Mouse like a fish through rushing water. Into the Blue seems designed to allow the listener to sink deeply into its vibes in a solitary manner. A press play and close your eyes sort of album. This is reflected in the common subject matter of loneliness and isolation. Whether one is a diehard fan, aware of the band’s megahit “The High Road”, or completely new, Into the Blue shows Broken Bells doing some of their best work.