It’s already begun. Chances are you’ve heard Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and it will not stop shaking around in your head. Complete with thumping bass line and the soul-stirring vocal from Cee-Lo Green, the song that could be the single of the year is all over radio, topping charts worldwide. It is one of the most downloaded songs online. “Crazy” is just the first of many more like it on Gnarls Barkley’s infectious debut St. Elsewhere. Gnarls Barkley is the collaborative effort of former Goodie Mob MC Green (a.k.a. Thomas Calloway) and producer DJ Danger Mouse (a.k.a. Brian Burton), whose credits include the outlawed Beatles/Jay-Z mash-up The Grey Album and recent records with Gorillaz and as half of DangerDoom. Mouse provides the richly detailed musical backdrop while Green drops his distinctive and ubiquitous melding of rap, soul and funk. The resulting record is a bona fide success as a genre-defiant collection of songs that could turn the tide of “pop music’s” connotation as curse words. “Smiley Faces” sounds like a great lost psychedelic Motown 45 recorded in space. “Who Cares?” dips into organ-laden, laid-back 1970s funk territory. Gnarls’ cover of the Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone” is about as perfect as a cover could be as it manages to thoroughly revamp an already great song without stripping away the meat and bones of it. Danger Mouse maneuvers a slinky electro beat to Green’s deadpanning vocal, which arguably bests Gordon Gano’s. While there isn’t a dull moment on St. Elsewhere, it isn’t a perfect record either. Some material here is filler, like the silly “Boogie Monster” and the CoD-Dirty South hiphop of “Transformer,” but such is only when compared to the many high points of the record. All in all, there is enough here to mark it one of the brightest musical spots of 2006. St. Elsewhere is the first must-have album to pump on the car stereo this summer.

Record producers are usually not the stars of the music industry. A life behind the mixing console can be well-paid but not so glorious, unless you are, say, “Mr. Wall of Sound” Phil Spector, whose patented sonic identity and colorful life made him a bigger name than most of the singers and musicians he worked with. Then there’s Phil’s punk rock equivalent: Martin Hannett. Hannett often described himself as a “Wall of Sound Merchant” in part as homage to Spector and in part as the most truthful assessment of what he did. It’s been 15 years since Hannett’s death but the sounds he helped sculpt couldn’t be more in the present tense, and the resonance of his sound is apparent in plenty of the younger bands of the moment. Making his base in Manchester, Hannett had his hand in many groundbreaking records; Zero is the first collection of its kind to offer a complete retrospective of Hannett’s remarkable but all-too-short career. His innovation and experimentation made him more than the average knob-twiddler and ultimately proves him, decades on, as the “Spector of post-punk,” a title he would no doubt be proud of. Beginning with 1977’s fevered punk pulse of Buzzcocks’ “Boredom,” one of the great opening salvos of English punk’s first year, and ending around the rise of Shaun Ryder and the Happy Mondays, with whom he knocked out the magnificently thuggish and cacophonously funky “Wrote For Luck,” Zero captures an across-the-board look at Hannett’s work. His greatest claim to fame could be as the de facto house producer for the fabled Factory Records imprint. Hannett cut landmark recordings with Joy Division (“Transmission,” with its sparse but explosive, dark beauty, is included here) and New Order as well as OMD, Vini Reilly’s the Durutti Column and the Names. Zero hits on some punk gems bound to find fresh ears, like Jilted John’s self-titled song and John Cooper Clarke’s rant “I Don’t Want to Be Nice.” On the other hand, it might surprise a few to find out that there are some artists and songs from Hannett’s resumé that scraped well into the mainstream, including a young band from Dublin, one of whose earliest songs was out to ape Joy Division (U2’s “11 O’Clock Tick Tock”) and a jangly masterpiece bound for teen movie glory (the Psychedelic Furs’ “Pretty in Pink.”)