E-Mail This Article to a Friend Unholy alliance MF Doom and Danger Mouse become DangerDoom BY CHRIS NELSON
	Related Links MF Doom's official Web site Danger Mouse's official Web site Chris Conti reviews MF Doom's Special Herbs, Volumes 1 & 2. Franklin Soults reviews MF Doom's Mm . . Food?. Franklin Soults on DJ Danger Mouse and The Grey Album. Carly Carioli on DJ Danger Mouse combining Jay-Z and the Beatles and the legal firestorm.Simon William Vozick-Levinson on hip hop and DJ Danger Mouse going from grey to Technicolor.

The first thing you hear isn’t music but a silly voice, lisping and exaggerated, asking, "Why did you buy this album?" Then a ghostly beat floats in, backed by spattering drums and spat upon by a gruff-toned MC who’s taking equal time to brag about his eBaying skills and his oboe playing. The rest is more subdued but no less bizarre: the rapper veers from topic to topic, pontificating on midgets, crunk, and Conan the Barbarian, with the beat occasionally dropping out from behind him to accent his punch lines, like some kind of inverted rim shot. And that’s just the first 2:35 of Danger-Doom’s The Mouse & the Mask (Epitaph).

If you’ve read anything written about MF Doom, you know he was a member of the early-’90s group KMD under the name ZevLove X. Doom (né Daniel Dumile) disappeared from the rap game in 1993 when his brother and partner, DJ SubRoc, was hit by a car and killed. He re-emerged under the Doom moniker in 1999 but hasn’t since appeared in public without his trademark metal mask. His Doom recordings could most gently be described as "eccentric." Not that there isn’t something to be said for a man who can pop off one-liners like Rodney Dangerfield while riding beats welded together from janky loops and monster-movie dialogue.

As the main contributor of lyrics to The Mouse & the Mask, Doom sticks to spinning non sequiturs and half-stories that depict him as a iron-fisted "supervillain" who eats lesser MCs like hors d’œuvre. "I order a rapper for lunch," he jokes on one track. "And spit out the chain." His punch lines aren’t quite as sharp as they were on two 2004 outings, the Madvillain (another alias) disc Madvillainy and the Doom disc MM . . Food? (both Insomniac), so his boasts have less merit. It’s hard to fault the man: he’s written so few choruses that he could just be suffering from verse fatigue.

Making up the rodent half of the title duo is hot-handed producer DangerMouse, best known for his copyright-blasting Grey Album. Danger does his part to keep the Doom æsthetic — which is something akin to a late-night B-movie — alive but can’t resist the urge to provide the rapper with more soulful material to flow over, as he did for MC Jemini on 2003’s Ghetto Pop Life. Sometimes the trick works, as on the slinking "Benzie Box," which invites Goodie Mob crooner Cee-Lo into the mix to sing a rare hook. Sometimes the thick production simply seems out of place.

The last and most notorious contributors to TM&TM are the characters from the Cartoon Network’s "Adult Swim" line-up. Family Guy, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Sealab 2021 — they’re all represented here, in one of the most bizarre promotional moves since the aforementioned Mr. Dangerfield’s own rap album. In one of the album’s best skits, Aqua Teen’s Master Shake leaves a series of increasingly furious voice mails, chastising Doom for not calling Shake first when he decided to make a record with cartoon characters.

Maybe this was inevitable. DangerMouse’s last production gig was with the animated band Gorillaz, and Madvillain’s first video featured a Hulk-like Doom smashing through comic-book panels. And both Doom and DangerMouse are named after cartoon characters to begin with. So no surprise that, with the music faltering at times, it’s the ’toons that bring out the best in The Mouse & the Mask.