CD Reviews

Beck

Modern Guilt | DGC

By ZETH LUNDY | July 15, 2008

4.0 Stars

Ever since his 2002 confessional, Sea Change, Beck’s music has been less absurd and more obliquely melancholic, the sound of pop art confronting itself. On Modern Guilt, his eighth major-label record, Beck and co-producer Danger Mouse craft a subversive summer album that pits narratives of spiritual and existential longing against noise-encrusted beats and dusty old-pop architecture. It’s music for summer nights of muggy confusion and post-sunset soul searching, and when Beck takes the mic, he rocks some straight-up Shiva shit: “To be loved or destroyed/From a void to a grain of sand in your hand.” Beck and Danger Mouse — whose ubiquity is quickly turning him into the alt-Timbaland — handle most of the album’s instrumentation, from the spy guitar that drives “Gamma Ray” to the infectious Doors-ian saloon hop of the title track. Meanwhile, “Chemtrails,” the only song with a live band, salvages the wreck of late-’60s head-psych, all waterlogged and reanimated, with a hazy shade of Pink Floyd pomp. Beck’s falsetto goes glassy-eyed under the spell of Joey Waronker’s drums and Jason Falkner’s bass — torrential reckonings of retro allusion. Modern Guilt is a hot thing of indefinite course, and perhaps, as Beck sings in “Volcano,” an attempt to “make it back into the womb of the world” — not so much to beat the heat, but to become one with it.

Related: Gorillaz in the midst, Broken Bells | Broken Bells, Musician + Author = Crap, More

Gorillaz in the midst
Remember the great electronica gold rush of ’97, the year Madonna’s Maverick label won a massive bidding war over long-ignored rave mystic Liam Howlett, a/k/a Prodigy, and we all grooved to the electropunk clash of “Smack My Bitch Up”?
Broken Bells | Broken Bells
Danger Mouse ( né Brian Burton) had a pretty good run through the '00s, a decade that saw him go from a mash-up nobody to producer du jour for a motley assortment of artists.
Musician + Author = Crap
On Tuesday, musician Ben Folds (formerly of the Five) and rock-obsessed novelist Nick Hornby ( High Fidelity ) released a collaborative record called Lonely Avenue . The result of this musical-literary team-up isn't excruciating.
Flashbacks: June 16, 2006
These selections, culled from our back files, were compiled by Hannah Van-Susteren, Doug Fleischer and Sam MacLaughlin.
The 40 greatest concerts in Boston history: 25
Beck + the Flaming Lips | Orpheum Theatre | October 28, 2002
Déjà vu
Prepare yourselves: R.E.M. have decided to become a rock band again.
Packin' 'em in on Lansdowne Street
Whoever told you that the post-punk revival is on the wane was wrong.
Hitsville USA
There are singles artists and there are album artists. Watch videos from Beck's The Information (Windows Media)
’Round the outside
Although music isn’t necessarily getting more political in content these days, it does seem to be borrowing a trope from the political world.
Gnarls Barkley: Rebirth of soul
I’m probably not the only one who went to the Gnarls Barkly show Friday night at Avalon wondering if the costumes would be the most interesting part. Slideshow: Gnarls Barkley at Avalon, August 11, 2006
London falling
Damon Albarn — Blur frontman, Gorillaz supremo, and now millennial minstrel to the drowning city of London — is that eerie modern specimen, the pop star who talks like a critic. The Good, The Bad, and the Queen, "Kingdom of Doom" (streaming video)
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