Karen O & Danger Mouse - Lux Prima (Vinyl)

Lux Prima is a collaborative studio album by American singer-songwriter Karen O and Danger Mouse. It was released in March 2019 under BMG Records/Warner. 

After lucratively manning the boards for a series of big pop names in recent years – Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adele, Portugal, The Mancorrect et al – Danger Mouse delivers what feels like more of a passion project. It’s reminiscent of another of these, his 2011 album Rome with composer Daniele Luppi: both are heavily influenced by Ennio Morricone’s compositional style of pattering drumbeats and sweeping strings. His cinematic ambition is foregrounded in the opening title track, a nine-minute symphonic pop suite centred around a theme that is revisited on the closing Nox Lumina, and, truth be told, isn’t particularly exciting. It serviceably denotes grandeur and romance but without any real melodic invention.

Where the album comes alive is with more traditional songwriting, anchored by Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O, who co-writes throughout. Her image in the popular imagination – a makeup-smeared sex banshee – does her a disservice: she has huge emotional and textural range, something that the handsome production helps to foreground here.

The single Woman is the most reminiscent of the YYYs, where booming, Phil Spector-ish girl group drums power a strutting O forward, declaring her feminine agency in that signature yelp. But there are so many other sides to her here. Turn the Light clips down a hallway with a wonderful lack of haste, a disco-funk number to file alongside Natalie Prass and Kacey Musgraves’ records from last year. O gets southern-accented as she relaxes, and it’s songs such as this where Danger Mouse’s austere yet sensual production shines: you can feel the air between every element, as well as the points where they brush against each other. Even better is Leopard’s Tongue, another 60s pop curio where Danger Mouse ratchets up the beauty along with the pain by feeding in keys and then brass, and where O sketches out a complex sexual dynamic through her very voice as well as the lyrics: a seductive falsetto tightens into clenched uncertainty on the chorus. Lounge-pop numbers reminiscent of Air or early Goldfrapp aren’t quite as arresting, but the whole album casts a lingering spell.

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