So you’ve just gotten the 2005 summer anthem ‘Girl’ out of your head - or at least its Atari-inspired intro - and now you’re hungry for another Beck hook to lodge itself in your lower brain. You’re in luck! Beck’s latest, The Information isn’t as unthinkingly giddy as Guero, but it has the funk and the reliable cool to make you happy, moved and addicted. Written primarily between Sea Change and Guero, The Information offers up big doses of each. Beck apparently still has something to bummed about, but it is not the overwhelming emotion and he’s found the fun side to disappointment and frustration.
Beck made us glad to be sad in our formative years with Mellow Gold and Mutations, and now he makes the melancholia of the 20/30-something demographic seem somehow pleasant. I hope this doesn’t mean that he’s dissatisfied at home, but whatever the source of his driving dissatisfaction (let’s hope it’s just a keen worldview), it serves him well.
So far the big talk has been about the unusual packaging and presentation geared towards selling more albums (combating piracy in a constructive way? what?). Maybe the content on the disc isn’t as radical as its packaging and bonus features (finding ways to sell albums is revolutionary?), but there’s plenty of Beck on here that hasn’t been heard before.
The Information is about sensory overload, and it contributes in its own special way. Fortunately, Beck isn’t throwing handfuls of spaghetti at the wall in the hopes that some of it sticks. Sure, there is a lot happening here (dial tones, robot burps and technological bleeps that can only be described as ‘information’ all populate the album’s soundscape), but the songs’ arrangements and construction are typical of the composer: doing strange new things with simple chord changes and beats we feel like we’ve heard somewhere before.
There are at least two solid hits, and plenty of gems that make listening to the album from start to finish a satisfying endeavor. By now you’ve already tired of ‘Nausea’, and sure to be next is ‘Think I’m in Love’, which I just heard on Chicago’s own Loyola University radio, WLUW (88.7). Track 4, ‘Strange Apparition’, is unusually straightforward piano rock, and tracks 7 through 10 keep tapping the brakes when the tempo wants to get loose (producer Nigel Goldrich’s string arrangements really help here). But just in case you were worried that age, Scientology and whiteness does not bode well for Beck’s hip-hop sensibilities, he gets fired up by track 11 with ‘1000 BPM’, before the album retreats back to contemplation, culminating in the 10+ minute finale ‘The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton’.
But is it new? Will it astound and amaze, as well as entertain? Does it cover new ground, or is it a throwback (like I heard Guero described) for fans that miss the ‘old Beck’? What a waste of commentary it would be to even go there…
… Well, okay, but just for a second…
If Beck has stagnated, at least he hasn’t humiliated himself, and if avoiding embarrassment is this groovy, then he should stick with it – it’s working. God forbid Beck make the same mistake U2 did when they tried to maintain the Joshua Tree-Auchtung Baby trajectory, and squeezed out Zooropa and Pop. They had to back pedal into insipid crap in the 21st Century to become relevant again (the argument over whether U2 was ever relevant to start with is for another time), and if Beck isn’t trying too hard to be different, that’s also his strength. He’s not thrift-store shopping these days, but he also refuses to show up to school in a leather jacket and a shaved head just to keep us on edge.
I should be shot for drawing parallels between U2 and Beck. Sorry. Go out and pick up The Information before Beck Hansen and The Killers get mentioned in the same breath.
2 Comments »
i’ve been spinning this record a lot lately. i really like it. i mean, it’s no midnite vultures (which [sadly?] soundtracked my life for several years), but beck never truly disappoints. some albums are better than others, but none of them are crap. ‘cellphones dead’ is my favorite track, i think.
however, i must say- i have a sneaking suspicion that beck is the anti-christ. he’s so damn charismatic and he hasn’t aged a day in the past decade.
if beck is the anti-christ, i’m even more certain than i already was that i’m hades-bound.
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Comment by joiezabel — October 28, 2006 @ 4:59 pm
you can hear both “nausea” and “think i’m in love” on his myspace, fyi…
http://www.myspace.com/beck
i think the u2/beck comparison is interesting. and they are both relevant. so there.