Album of the Week/Primer: Beck part 10- Modern Guilt

Counting Stereopathetic Soulmanure and One Foot In The Grave, which some people don't, Modern Guilt marks Beck's 10th album. It's at this point in most long-running careers that the double digit milestone causes an artist to rip everything up and start again. But, since Beck has made a career out of stylistic jumps, what is he to do?? It turns out, what he does is record the most concise album of his career, and one that revitalizes his art after a few albums of standing still.

While I liked The Information, there's no denying that Modern Guilt is a superior album in every regard. It is almost half the length of The Information and bursting with new ideas and fantastic songs. There isn't a dud to be had here. Along with Radiohead's In Rainbows, a later career, ultra-tight and concise album that saw the band lightening the mood a bit, Modern Guilt hones Beck's songwriting to a fine point and marries his increasingly dark and paranoid lyrics to a bedrock combination of late 60s garage rock and modern day hip hop. Some of this new sound must come from producer Danger Mouse, who rose to prominence based on his mash-up of the Beatles's White Album (1968) and Jay Z's The Black Album (2003).

Many critics have remarked about the dark nature of the lyrics on Modern Guilt, what with its obsessions over the environment, death, age, etc. Those of us who've been paying attention to the sub-text of albums post-Sea Change have noticed this encroaching heaviness. At any rate, Modern Guilt is the most successful at tackling these themes because Beck is at the center of these songs at all times. Guero and The Information had a tendency toward burying Beck beneath a whiz-bang crust of samples, funky beats, atmospherics, and cryptic, hard-to-make-out vocals. Modern Guilt is a relatively straightforward album for Beck, by contrast, because his lyrics are generally easy to hear and understand, while the music itself is stripped down even further than The Information. Frequently making use of a 60s garage rock backing of guitar, bass, and percussion, Beck and Danger Mouse also offer drum machines, keyboards, and discrete loops/samples when necessary.

Modern Guilt's true contribution to Beck's discography is in bringing back the Beck of effortless melodies and catchy songs. Going back to Midnite Vultures and working your way forward, it quickly becomes apparent how few new ideas Beck was having. Modern Guilt is endlessly inventive, with melodies, rhythms, and hooks packed inside of each other. Even the less immediate songs like 'Chemtrails' (a slow burning, gradually building psychedelic ballad) and 'Replica' (with its glitchy electronic beats that sound more like something off an Autechre album) contain more new and great ideas than The Information, which I felt contained a few interesting new ideas, but still not enough. As usual, though, the true appeal of a Beck album is the upbeat songs, and Modern Guilt is no slouch here, with the addictive 'Gamma Ray', the incessant beat of the title track, and the ultra-distorted 'Profanity Prayers' which opens up like a flower during its chorus.

One only hopes that other long-going artists will follow the lead of Radiohead and Beck in creating half-hour-ish albums of such clarity and inventiveness. Only time will tell if Modern Guilt spells a rebirth, a renaissance, for Beck's art. Whatever the case may turn out to be, we're left with one of the most pleasing and immediately enjoyable albums in his discography.