(Courtesy of Interscope Records.)
For those critics who believe that sincerity is the last mask of a dying artist, 2002’s broken-hearted Sea Change represented the last Beck album to be greeted by near unanimous acclaim. Since that mournful effort, Mr. Hansen’s work has been met with an increasingly hostile reception. 2006’s Guero was written off as a lazy rehash of Odelay, and last year’s The Information met a similar fate, with many critics preferring to comment on the gimmick of being able design your own album cover rather than the actual music.
Lost in all this is the fact that both those albums featured some of Beck’s best and most melodic songs, from the shy and infectious “Think I’m in Love”, through to the incredibly hooky “Girl” and “E-Pro”. With perhaps one exception (the downbeat but danceable “Gamma Ray”), this trend does not continue with Modern Guilt. It’s an introspective album in the mold of Sea Change, but it wades through moral dilemmas and existential quandaries instead of heartbreak.
Before Modern Guilt’s release, there were signs we might have a classic on our hands. Since Odelay, Beck has jumped back and forth between The Dust Brothers and Nigel Godrich for production duties. On Modern Guilt, Danger Mouse of Gnarls Barkley fame was at the mixing board. A few weeks before the album was released, listeners got their first taste of Modern Guilt when a song called “Chemtrails” began streaming on Beck’s website, a thoroughly convincing slice of dream-pop that sounds like a Super Furry Animals track, and crucially, if Beck was to outrun his critics, nothing like any Beck tune that’s come before it. One moment, it’s near comatose with only Beck’s ethereal Brian Wilson-like vocals keeping the track afloat, the next it’s crashing and thrashing with Joey Waronker’s pounding drums (incidentally, the only live drums on the entire album).
Danger Mouse, for his part, brings his love of concision and 60’s pop to the fore. The album clocks in at a slender thirty-three minutes without wasting a second of runtime. He’s also developed a knack over the past few years for allowing a songwriter to express their apocalyptic anxieties without coming across as either mad or melodramatic. The sweeping flourish of Middle-Eastern strings on “Walls” eases the sting of lines like “Because you know that we're better than that / But some days we're worse than you can imagine”, while the backbeat bounce of “Gamma Ray” makes Beck’s visions of “icecaps melting down” easier to stomach.
And make no mistake, Beck is on a quest to unmask exactly what modern guilt is. He gets close on the title track, but it’s on the tenth and final song “Volcano” that he paints the most evocative picture of twenty-first century anxiety. By not only doing away with rhyme, but carefully choosing words that don’t easily fit into the rhythm of the song, Beck mirrors the anarchy of day-to-day banality.
The last photo on the inside cover of Modern Guilt’s CD insert is a shot of an exit sign. I’m not sure if Beck escapes or even exorcises the moral problems of our age on this album, but he does encapsulate it all in just over half an hour of fantastic music. Ladies and gentlemen, meet your new frontrunner for album of the year.
Lost in all this is the fact that both those albums featured some of Beck’s best and most melodic songs, from the shy and infectious “Think I’m in Love”, through to the incredibly hooky “Girl” and “E-Pro”. With perhaps one exception (the downbeat but danceable “Gamma Ray”), this trend does not continue with Modern Guilt. It’s an introspective album in the mold of Sea Change, but it wades through moral dilemmas and existential quandaries instead of heartbreak.
Before Modern Guilt’s release, there were signs we might have a classic on our hands. Since Odelay, Beck has jumped back and forth between The Dust Brothers and Nigel Godrich for production duties. On Modern Guilt, Danger Mouse of Gnarls Barkley fame was at the mixing board. A few weeks before the album was released, listeners got their first taste of Modern Guilt when a song called “Chemtrails” began streaming on Beck’s website, a thoroughly convincing slice of dream-pop that sounds like a Super Furry Animals track, and crucially, if Beck was to outrun his critics, nothing like any Beck tune that’s come before it. One moment, it’s near comatose with only Beck’s ethereal Brian Wilson-like vocals keeping the track afloat, the next it’s crashing and thrashing with Joey Waronker’s pounding drums (incidentally, the only live drums on the entire album).
Danger Mouse, for his part, brings his love of concision and 60’s pop to the fore. The album clocks in at a slender thirty-three minutes without wasting a second of runtime. He’s also developed a knack over the past few years for allowing a songwriter to express their apocalyptic anxieties without coming across as either mad or melodramatic. The sweeping flourish of Middle-Eastern strings on “Walls” eases the sting of lines like “Because you know that we're better than that / But some days we're worse than you can imagine”, while the backbeat bounce of “Gamma Ray” makes Beck’s visions of “icecaps melting down” easier to stomach.
And make no mistake, Beck is on a quest to unmask exactly what modern guilt is. He gets close on the title track, but it’s on the tenth and final song “Volcano” that he paints the most evocative picture of twenty-first century anxiety. By not only doing away with rhyme, but carefully choosing words that don’t easily fit into the rhythm of the song, Beck mirrors the anarchy of day-to-day banality.
The last photo on the inside cover of Modern Guilt’s CD insert is a shot of an exit sign. I’m not sure if Beck escapes or even exorcises the moral problems of our age on this album, but he does encapsulate it all in just over half an hour of fantastic music. Ladies and gentlemen, meet your new frontrunner for album of the year.
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