Beck - Modern Guilt
Beck's 10th album, co-produced by Danger Mouse, is a blast from the past, a good deal of wandering through the present and a stern look at the future. It's sixties psychedelic mixed with modern-melancholy. Orphans "Think I'm stranded but I don't know where . . ." is the disoriented beginning of the tightly assembled, cleverly arranged album. Gamma Ray touches on our existing and impending environmental troubles. "With these icecaps melting down, with the transistor sound . . ." and "I want to know what I've lost today . . ." Chemtrails is a psych-rock modern day Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. With jet planes and chemtrails, not marmalade skys. Title-track Modern Guilt is a paradox - not uncommon to Beck nor to Danger Mouse - with friendly, intriguing, "dance-able" beats and modern-melancholy lyrics. Youthless is filled with synthesizers and lyrics redolent of the increasingly helpless world in which we live. To sum up Walls & quote The Beatles "Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see . . . " Soul of A Man brings steady pounding percussion with a self-reflective vibe. "What makes the soul, the soul of a man?" Profanity Prayer is a bit faster-paced featuring some more classically Beck charismatic rhymes like " In a cast iron cage you couldn't help but stare like a creature, with the laws of a brothel and the fireproof bones of a preacher . . ." Volcano is like walking home after a long journey; trying to remember where you live. "I've been walking on these streets so long, I don't know where they're going to lead anymore . . ." and later "I don't know where I've been, but I know where I'm going . . ." This is an excellent album. It captures the present in such a way as I have not heard this year from any other. No cd collection is complete without it.
Beck played this year's O2 Wireless Festival and will be playing at the Austin City Limits festival in September. A three day music festival at Zilker Park in Austin, Texas, which R13 will be covering.