I’ll acknowledge Maura’s point (over IM) that it’s better he do this kind of second-rate Unrest than something grandly glum. But watching “Gamma Ray,” now complete with unmemorable, psychedelic video, I can’t help but feel that his collaboration with Danger Mouse is the latest sign of the stagnancy and self-marginalization he’s been suffering from ever since his 2002 Gordon Lightfoot album did better than his 1999 pop album. Even as he hops from name producer to name producer, I can’t imagine we’ll see a big change in Beck’s work any time soon. [YouTube]
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All right, I’ll go this far: I like Guero.
Is it Odelay? No. It’s not even Midnite Vultures, which will go down as one of the great, misunderstood left-field swings by a major pop act in the last 20 years. So, fine - it’s no high-water-mark.
Guero is just Beck doing “a Beck album,” which is why everyone gives him shit for it, but the thing is, it’s a very good Beck album: catchy songs, funny hooks, witty bits of business (some of which emerged in sharper relief on the best remixes on Guerolito, which I also liked).
I basically defend Guero the way I defend another 2005 album by an aging pop star, Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor. It’s an artist commenting on and interpreting his/her own genre — but that in itself doesn’t make it a bad album. Yet that’s what most of the Beck-has-released-nothing-but-shit-since-2000 brigade seem to take as a core principle.
I’m prepared to be alone on this.
Dead-eyed Scientologist goober. I think his only “great” album is Midnite Vultures. If that’s a “miss,” then it’s a gloriously inventive miss of Angel Dust-proportions.
Everything else he’s released has been too-cute ear-candy or self-referential mope.
@Chris Molanphy:
Serioulsy, what’s with all the “most listenable Beck album since Sea Change” haterade going on lately? Jesus. I stand behind every point made in your comment above sir. Guero is nicely sequenced, and has some jams on it. And major props for the Midnite Vultures love. That album rocked my world when it first came out. It’s also the one Beck album that gets major Black love from my mom, sister, cousin, and little brother. I’m guessing this has a lot to do with me bumping Debra ad naseum back in the day. Though Moms loves her some Sexx Laws and Mixed Bizness as well.*
*Yes I recognize the awkwardness of this sentence. Deal with it.
@Chris Molanphy: Who “misunderstood” Midnite Vultures? The critics that placed it third in Pazz & Jop that year?
Sea Change is damn good. The above is not.
Thanks!
Beck is an unfortunate casualty of my boycott of the art and creative productions of scientologists. Except the Simpsons, okay I maybe I can listen to this song one more time.
Chiming in very late to add the praise for MV; and, if you culled tracks off of the previous two albums and sequenced them properly, you would have a pretty solid album. Plus, the Mae Shi remix of Guero is actually the best Beck song of this decade.
But I do have a theory: while in the early ’90s Beck’s shit-stirring weapon of choice was a leaf-blower (for example), he’s moved on to a more dangerous way to test audience patience: blandness. Modern Times isn’t just bland, it’s somehow aggressively bland.
Fingers crossed that on the 20th aniversary of “Loser” he leaks, on the internet, around 100 great tracks kept hidden until now because of the blandness thing.
Or maybe he just ran out of ideas.
@nonce: So you’re suggesting that Beck is pulling a Pearl Jam and intentionally releasing junk until his contract is up, whereupon he will put out a two-CD set of all the great songs he’s been saving?
Being ‘Clear’ means being banal and tawdry.