Joker's Daughter
The Last Laugh
Rating: 2.5
Label: Team Love
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I have to admit that I haven't really had a preconceived notion of what to expect from Danger Mouse at any given time, but I never thought he'd be part of an album that's equal parts Dido and Loreena McKennitt. The debut from Joker's Daughter, The Last Laugh, is itself like some joke played on the listener, completely devoid of irony and entirely devoted to answering the eternal question: what if Joanna Newsom learned how to sing and decided to make light electro-tinged folk?
One has to wonder if Helena Costas, the Joanna Newsom substitute behind Joker's Daughter, has some kind of dirt on Danger Mouse. The two initially started working together in 2003, but their project fell by the wayside when Danger Mouse suddenly became one of the most in-demand producers in the world. Instead of just letting the past remain the past, Costas resurrected the Joker's Daughter moniker this year and now we have The Last Laugh. The album is almost entirely a waste of Danger Mouse's talents but he brings his best anyway, like the musical equivalent of an appearance by Christopher Walken or Dennis Hopper in a trash film: as good as they are and as memorable their moments can be, they ultimately cannot save the doomed productions they're a part of. In a way, the only good that comes out of this unlikely partnership is that it ably proves that Danger Mouse is capable of excelling at anything he's given.
Unfortunately, Costas drags the entire endeavor down with her nasally, quavering voice that fails both at being interesting in the way Newsom's occasionally can be and technically proficient enough to demand respect. Even worse, her lyrics are little more than the tossed off refuse of a bored high school teenager still too into Renaissance Fair and the concept of the damsel in distress. With enough mentions of misty mountain tops to infuriate even Robert Plant, Costas should have spent the six-year gap in her and Danger Mouse's partnership crafting a writing style that feels less like a novelty and more like an insightful perspective. For example, "Go Walking" sonically feels like the b-side to "The Highwayman" and lyrically depicts an evening in a land where "the air is filled with spirits of the dead" and there are "castles haunted for a thousand years." Costas is more effective when she doesn't sing so much as sigh and mutter, such as on the Nick Drake-esque "Jessie the Goat."
The instances where Danger Mouse is allowed to basically roam free are startlingly effective, whether it's the electro-folk of "Lucid" or the slightly menacing "Last Laugh," an instrumental that could have scored Labyrinth in another era. But even Danger Mouse isn't entirely free of blame; the dub-tinged mess of "Jelly Belly" is almost completely the result of its overly fussy, poorly executed production, though the childish lyrics don't exactly help things. Yet when Danger Mouse is on he's dangerously innovative; if tracks like the gypsy marching band stomper "The Running Goblin" or the gleefully unhinged "The Bull Bites Back" were handled by a stronger talent at the mic, they'd be signs of an exciting new hybrid genre. Instead, they're just sad reminders of the inability of The Joker's Daughter to find the right balance between outstanding production and a captivating vocal delivery.
But maybe the whole thing is just a stop-gap, a chance for Danger Mouse to experiment with a performer who doesn't have an already established pedigree under a moniker that won't really be tied to him permanently. You can't really fault an artist for expanding his horizons and switching things up a bit. All you can fault him for is failing at picking a worthwhile vessel for his experiments.
by Morgan Davis