Modern Guilt

 

 

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I don't think that I can be terribly articulate about this or explain the reasons this album resonated with me so strongly. I think it is just the sheer quality of the material and mastery of the artist.

I apologize in advance if the vagueness of this review is not terribly helpful. But, I must say that as a musicholic, it is very rare for me to react in so strongly a fashion upon first listen. I encourage you to listen to the bits and pieces you can find online to see for yourself. The hooks, vocals, tunes and melodies have totally grabbed me. I can't remember the last time that I felt that I was hearing something brilliant after listening one time. I'm on my second listen right now and it not only holds up, I'm increasingly impressed by what I dare call a masterpiece (ok, let's say amazingly good, mature, and fully realized album). But, Beck is now the artist on my "most want to follow" list after this pretty remarkable release.

On his tour behind 2006's The Information, Beck and his band were accompanied by a troupe of marionette doppelgängers. Projected onto a big screen, the dot-eyed puppets mimicked the group with uncanny accuracy; if Beck triumphantly raised his hand during "Devil's Haircut", his counterpart quickly followed. As the distance between concert DVDs and concerts themselves continues to dwindle, the puppet scheme was a winning example of spontaneous, analog cleverness. It was also a crafty bit of outsourcing. The cute figurines provided much of the night's visual entertainment while offering a distraction from Beck's increasingly uninvolved performances. Since the famed stops on his Odelay tour more than a decade ago, he's become a static shell of his former break-dancing, bed-humping self. Similarly, while Beck has gotten darker and more apocalyptic, he's tried to temper his direness with upbeat, counter-punch production from the Dust Brothers, Nigel Godrich, and now, Danger Mouse. Though Modern Guilt is more direct and consistent than his last two scattershot LPs, it also finds the disillusioned L.A. hippie struggling to balance his deathly outlook with his more crowd-pleasing inclinations.

It wasn't always like this. At his creative peak Beck tackled everything from R&B to hip-hop to folk, and more often than not, his songs' sentiments matched their styles. On a base level, Sea Change was full of downtrodden couplets matched with picturesque melancholia; the falsetto zaniness of Midnite Vultures corresponded with its equally bizarre and hilarious imagery. And while there were plenty of serious specters like ghosts and devils all over Odelay, they were used to symbolize the invincibility of youth while the album's pastiche funk kept the post-modern party alive. But starting with Guero, the disconnect between the singer's frisky beat-based pop and his suffocating anxieties became more apparent ("Earthquake Weather", for instance, was filled with musings like, "The days go slow into a void we filled with death"). And now, after the overlong space jam The Information warned of modern society's ills while pumping futuristic dance-folk, we get Modern Guilt, probably Beck's most harrowing collection of songs yet.

As usual, you probably wouldn't pick up on the record's gravity by putting it on at a cookout. Danger Mouse does a decent job of injecting the record with the same 1960s sounds found on Gnarls Barkley's LPs: Scratchy snares, surf-rock rhythms, and piano vamps pop up and disappear in no-nonsense, three-minute bursts (at just over a half hour, the disc is half as long as The Information). Beck's first new producing partner in eons, Danger Mouse mostly plays into the star's love of vintage aesthetics while working in snippets of his signature style. The wobbly rocker "Orphans" could be a Mutations outtake, drum 'n' bass lullaby "Replica" would sound at home anywhere on The Information, and the lush "Volcano" would have made an excellent Sea Change bonus cut-- it's also one of very few songs on the album that couples its tenuous ennui with an appropriate backdrop. Interestingly, the record's best psych-rock showing-- the tripped-out "Chemtrails", featuring a wicked drum exhibition courtesy of longtime Beck collaborator Joey Waronker-- is also the only track that doesn't include any of Danger Mouse's beats or loops.

Elsewhere, Beck pushes his happy/sad dichotomy to its breaking point. "Gamma Ray" combines a beach-party beat with ecological updates ("If I could hold hold out for now/ With these icecaps melting down") and a call for nuclear annihilation. The title track comes on with plenty of Spoon-esque strut and swagger only to dwell on collective insecurities: "Don't know what I've done but I feel ashamed." These are nice tricks, but after two albums of similar bait-and-switches, they grow tired; with the world legitimately bent on a one-way trip to hell, Beck fails to ease the tension with the unadulterated fun he built his name on. (Tellingly, the 38-year-old recently admitted he's "not proud of" several songs from his wildest LP, Midnite Vultures, all signs of which have been erased from his live show.)

"I'm tired of people who only want to be pleased/ But I still want to please you," sings Beck on closer "Volcano". It's the most personal song on the album, where the alt-rock journeyman stunningly conflates his own troubles with those of the world at large. In his heyday, Beck seemed to please everyone by pleasing himself-- each new genre excursion was met with new fans and a fresh appreciation for his limitless talent. Now things don't come so easy. "It's harder and harder to write songs these days," he told The New York Times last week. "I'm always slashing and burning, going, 'Is this too on the sleeve?' But if you're not up front like that then you're hiding behind something, so it's a real maneuvering." With its off-the-cuff cover, brevity, and ramshackle feel, Modern Guilt comes off like Beck's attempt to outrun those songwriting complications. But the reluctance to break with his own conventions is still evident. The album ends with a look ahead: "I don't know where I've been, but I know where I'm going/ To that volcano/ I don't want to fall in, though/ Just want to warm my bones on that fire a while." It's a cautious prophesy-- maybe too cautious.

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