Given their relentless quirkiness, Gnarls Barkley were never going to do a normal download promotion for their latest album, but even by their ‘Crazy´ standards, offering it as free backwards MP3 seems like a strange move.
Yep, you heard right: If you go to a specially set up website, you can download The Odd Couple for free. As well as being reversed, all 13 tracks are compiled into a single audio file.
Non-technical sorts might turn their noses up at such an offer, but the truth is that, if you have even a basic audio editing application - such as the freeware Audacity - reversing the audio back to its original state and separating the tracks is easy.
So, what Gnarls Barkley seem to be implying is that they´re happy for fans to have their music for nothing, but only if they do a bit of work to get it.
There´s no explanation as to why the band have done this, though we´d be interested to hear what their record company thinks about it. As for us, we´re firing up our audio editors as we type…