BECK – Modern Guilt – 2008 – Album review
HIGHLIGHTS: Orphans – Gamma Ray – Soul Of Man
SOUNDBITE:
RATING: 2.5/5
Modern Guilt? Retro guilt more like. There’s very little that sounds modern on this LP and more than a little to be guilty about. Like producer Brian ‘Dangermouse’ Burton’s Gnarls Barkley, Beck has also proven to have a generally highly successful talent for genre-mashing. So how the fuck these two together managed to end up delivering this wishy-washy pastiche of the sort of psychedelia Love and Thirteenth Floor Elevators were banging out forty odd years ago, I fail completely to understand. And while those bands really were banging it out, Beck sounds so half-arsed on this that I would fully understand if things like chewing his food and finishing his own sentences were too much trouble during the time it took to make. Also his ‘I took a handful of those word fridge magnets, through them up in the air and then used what came down as the basis for my lyrics’ approach to song-writing which has certainly had a quirky charm in the past, is just plain irritating on this - “Your brains are bored/ Like a refugee from the houses burning/ And the heatwave’s calling your name.” What?
Like a few of the tracks on here, there is the odd percussive detail on opener, Orphans which reveals that this wasn't actually made in 1968 but otherwise it’s straight from Arthur Lee’s wastepaper basket just as Gamma Ray and Soul Of Man are from Roky Erickson’s. Don’t get me wrong - it’s not even the retro thing that’s the problem – its just that if you’re going to do something you might at least put some energy into it and this often lacks both energy and the real and metaphorical colour integral to psychedelia. I guess it’s testament to the amount of talent that both Beck and Dangermouse possess that this is in any way a tolerable listen.
Out now on Interscope.
LINKS
Listen to Beck - Modern Guilt
Beck - Myspace
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