A Rodent In the Gorilla House

By Josh Tyrangiel/London

In 2003 Brian Burton's life was turned upside down by a joke. As a composer-producer-DJ working under the name Danger Mouse (often in a mouse costume to ease his stage fright), Burton had a solid career on music's experimental fringe when it hit him: mix the Beatles' White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album, and you get a gray album. "I was cleaning my house at the time," says Burton. "It wasn't my deepest thought ever." Still, he spent three cloistered weeks in his bedroom translating snippets of Beatles music into hip-hop rhythm and synchronizing them with Jay-Z's vocals. Then he burned The Grey Album for a few friends. Within a month, more than 1 million copies had been downloaded from the Internet.

Suddenly Burton was famous, and not entirely happy about it. The Grey Album didn't just use unlicensed samples from two of the world's most famous artists--it was only unlicensed samples, and the Beatles' label, EMI, is vigilant about enforcing its copyrights. "You couldn't make a more illegal album," says Burton. "When it spread beyond being a little art project, of course EMI came after me." It wasn't just the cease-and-desist business that bothered him. He was also a little put out by the acclaim heaped on his Frankenstein's monster (ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY named it the best album of 2004). "Mixing two records takes discipline and creativity, but it's not talent," he says. "It's just output." When the hype cooled, Burton feared that his little gag might pigeonhole him as a novelty act. "I don't want to dismiss it, but it was a weird kind of success."

Luckily, Burton got a second chance to make an impression on the world's ears. Damon Albarn, the singer-songwriter behind the acclaimed British band Blur and the multiplatinum rap-rock concoction Gorillaz, heard The Grey Album and liked it. "But I loved the metaphor," says Albarn, "the mixing of genres and the idea that you can take past and present and make something futuristic." Albarn summoned Burton to London and quickly hired him to produce Gorillaz's second album, Demon Days, out this week. Albarn says he and Burton had "loads of music" in common. They are also both willful eccentrics; Gorillaz, which is made up of, usually, Albarn and a few friends, doesn't actually appear in its videos or onstage. Instead Gorillaz is represented by postapocalyptic cartoon characters, none of which are gorillas. Gorillaz also happens to record for Virgin Records, a division of EMI. "The label was very concerned that I was working with someone who had just hijacked a Beatles record," says Albarn. "Oh, well."

Albarn should have been more concerned that his new producer didn't have much experience producing. "I've been making music for 10 years," says Burton. "But a lot of that was me sitting in my bedroom." Despite his greenness, Burton announced early on that he doesn't like happy songs ("I'm just really into dark music and minor chords") and that he wanted to turn his back on sampling, which, at that point, was the only thing he was known for. Having spent most of the '90s with Blur, warring with Oasis' Gallagher brothers over the very important matter of which band was Britain's best, Albarn, 37, has since matured into something of a pop Brahmin, using his fortune to underwrite ambitiously weird projects. "I'm in a position to be charmed by audacity," says Albarn. "Brian's a good soul. You can't possibly dislike him. He's young, but he's a proper adventurer, and I wanted that spirit to drive me."

After Burton moved into Albarn's London studio--ever the bedroom prodigy, he had most of his equipment shipped from his Los Angeles home--the duo settled into a comfortable routine of routinelessness. "We just chased ideas and tried anything we wanted," says Burton. Those are words to chill a record executive's heart. And, sure enough, so many ideas were tried, chopped up and discarded that production went well past its initial deadline. When EMI announced in February that Gorillaz's and Coldplay's albums were both delayed, the company's stock dropped 16%. Burton says that gave him no retributive thrill. "We had a place we wanted to get to. We didn't care about anything outside the studio."

Give Demon Days a casual listen, and it sounds like a concept album about environmental collapse. There's a children's choir and an appearance by Dennis Hopper in full freak mode--all of which is to say, Yuck. But give the album a fraction of the attention that went into making it, and it reveals itself as close to great. The lyrics remain a bafflement--although it's clear from titles like Fire Coming Out of a Monkey's Head and Every Planet We Reach Is Dead that in the future, according to Gorillaz, we'll need more sunscreen--but the music achieves the same kind of thrilling dislocation as vintage Sun Ra, without any of the unfortunate cat-yelping antimelodiousness. Melodies are everywhere; they just take a while to emerge because Albarn and Burton have stirred them all together. Dirty Harry has the shimmering keyboards of The Message and the eerily blank kiddie chorus of Another Brick in the Wall. O Green World has a Song 2 guitar line and a countermelody seemingly by Atari. Reference points from rock, rap, dance, dub and world music pop up and disappear again, blending until Demon Days feels like a unified theory of music (even if it never generates anything so rigorous or fussy as an actual theory). Burton says he hopes he gave Albarn "the metaphor he wanted." He did, and it's even better than his joke.