Music Notes: Beck, Guero

August 14th, 2006

Tanja received a box of promo CDs from a record label, so I think it will be fun for me to post my aging, Gen X thoughts about this new music.”

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Music I first heard Beck’s “Mellow Gold” lying on the floor of a friend’s Manhattan apartment, saying to him, well, Loser is okay, but if I lent you my four-track for six months I bet you could could come up with something just as good. Then when Odelay arrived, I felt like a moron for underestimating Beck’s talent.

Since then he’s been doing something difficult for many artists, altering his style on each subsequent album. He adapted 60s and 70s classic rock, from the funk-disco of Midnite Vultures to early 70s singer-songwriters on Sea Change, lending it a modern production edge and a bit of an “Is this guy really as talented as he sounds, or is it all a cheeky put-on?” feeling that I found enjoyable.

So comes Guero, and I have to admit, there are only three or four songs here I can really get behind, and only one I really like: Hell Yes has a pretty goofy talk-back between a Japanese girl and a computer that made me chuckle a bit and smile at the surreal stupidity of it all. Earthquake Weather has a killer chorus right out of some Bee-Gees / Brian Wilson implosion. And Girl is a reluctant nod, mostly for its Nintendo intro.

The rest is not exactly boring, just missing that wacky, fruity, unpredictable Beck quality I always liked, screaming “I met you at JC Penny” like the Jackson 5, the aggressive space-cadet Beatles in Pressure Zone or the dippy video-game-show intro to The New Pollution. After the drastic acoustic sedation nose-dive into Sea Change, I guess I was hoping Beck would spin off into some other looney musical direction. But he decided to take a step back and recollect, and the results aren’t exactly bad, just kind of dull. And somehow I don’t think that’s what he was going for.