Danger Mouse likes The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly a lot. So much so that for his new studio album he decided to join with Italian composer Daniele Luppi, guitar vagabond Jack White and Norah Jones, and make a soundtrack for a movie that doesn’t exist. The result is Rome, an album that sounds like a spaghetti western, but has no real purpose besides sounding like a spaghetti western. More just a rambling instrumental mess of songs suited for a movie than any pop album, Rome gets lost in its own grandiose vision and never comes down, and that’s a problem for casual listeners.
This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2011.
