Between the release of Guero (and its remix sibling Guerolito) and the release of The Information Beck did an interview with Wired magazine talking about the future of the album as a format. Though The Information was released with some of these ideas--the blank cover to be "designed" by the listener, the full set of silly on-the-cheap videos that came with the initial batch of discs or could be easily accessed on video sites--it was only with the Deluxe Edition, released last year, that the album truly felt "complete" to Beck's vision.This edition of the album comes with all 4 possible sticker sets one could have gotten with the original release, as well as a disc collecting the remixes done for the album, as well as a handful of b-sides/outtakes. Beck's new concept for the album was thus set: it would be up to listener how he or she experienced the album. They could make their own version of it between the combination of "official" tracks, the b-sides/outtakes, and the remixes. They could watch the videos. They could make their own cover and liner artwork. The concept seemed to be that an artist would create an unfinished package of music and artwork and would leave it up to the listener (and other artists, judging by the remixes) to "finish" the album.
On paper and theoretically, this sounds intelligent and forward thinking. In practice, it's either lazy or pretentious. You see, people have been making their own versions of albums for years. It's a famous thought experiment/argument starter to have people create a one-CD version of the Beatles' White Album, and as soon as people could record albums to their own cassette tapes they were cherry picking their favorite songs. As for the "create your own artwork!!" thing it's a gimmick; admittedly a kind of neat one, because anytime you give the public the tools to make something they'll turn out things you never thought of...but it's still a gimmick. The biggest problem I have with the concept is that I'm not a musician or a producer. I want artists to finish their album and present me with a completed work rather than trying to bring me into their process, however skeletally. You really want me to help you make an album, give me full access to your master tapes, let me help edit/write your lyrics, allow me to choose between different professionally rendered covers, etc.
I've gone three paragraphs without even getting to the music yet, which is exactly why I want to begin the meat of my review by saying that The Information is Beck's most misunderstood and complicated album. Misunderstood because it's neither another Odelay-also ran like Guero nor is it a return to the somber Sea Change, which was produced by Nigel Godrich (who, I'll awkwardly note, is the producer of this album as well). Rather, The Information is something like a step in a new direction for Beck even though it doesn't sound radically different. And The Information is Beck's most complicated album for two reasons: all of the above paragraphs of album deep thoughts and the fact that it is derived from multiple sessions over the years, dating from the end of Sea Change to concurrent with Guero and possibly beyond. If you take Beck's word for it, The Information was recorded, off and on, from late 2003 to early 2006. Somewhere in there, he got with the Dust Brothers and recorded Guero.
Ironically, then, The Information is more cohesive and consistent than Guero. Part of this credit must, one supposes, go to Nigel Godrich, who has a history of helping bands get simultaneously more experimental but also tighter at the same time (at least, that's how I see it). Anyway, The Information is a deceptive album because all the press surrounding it would have you believe it's either another party-time Odelay sequel or a mixture of Guero and Sea Change because of its lyrical darkness and equal measure of party and mellow songs. However, The Information represents for Beck a step in some new directions because of its (relative) minimalism and lack of samples. Doing a side-by-side comparison of Guero and The Information, almost all of the songs on the latter lack samples and have significantly less sound elements going at a time. Witness 'Motorcade', which is a minimalist electronic piece that has the same twinkling piano feel as Radiohead's 'Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box.' Witness 'Cellphone's Dead', which is built on a melody borrowed from Herbie Hancock's 'Chameleon' and therefore isn't built on an explicit sample of another song, unlike Guero's 'E-Pro.' Not that Beck has to produce all live instrumentation to be good, of course, but The Information is truly cohesive where Guero failed because it borrows ideas and influences instead of directly lifting them. For those keeping score at home, this is also why Mutations and Midnite Vultures were so successful: Beck is better at making new things of borrowed ideas than he is at making new things from directly copied ideas. Hell, I liked 'E-Pro', but mostly because I like the riff from 'So What'Cha Want' by the Beastie Boys. To put it further, 'Cellphone's Dead' and Odelay borrow ideas but don't use them in total to make a song. 'E-Pro' is almost all about that stolen riff.
Moreso than anything else, you really get the feeling that the details of The Information were sweated upon and fretted over even if Beck ended up throwing the whole thing to the public in a muddled mess of "it's the future, today!! Make your own version!!" conceits. Since the album took--or so we're told--almost three years to finish, the songs have a careful attention to melodies, sounds, and rhythm that often felt arbitrary or lacking on Guero. At the same time, The Information has a kind of stoned flow to it. Watching the video version of the album today, I got the sense that the arbitrary, silliness of the costumes and actions were done under the influence of something. Notably, the album's middle is mellow, psychedelic, and slow. After the superb strut of 'Nausea' we get the one-two-three combo of 'Dark Star', 'Movie Theme' (as close to dream-pop as Beck will ever get), and 'We Dance Alone', the latter of which unites hip hop and musique concrete psychedelia. As for new directions for Beck, there's the glitchy stop-start rap rant '1000 BPM', which most people seem to hate but I think is brilliant, and the way 'Strange Apparition' starts off kind of generically before morphing into a slower, chunkier beast halfway through. Thankfully there's plenty of Beck's gift for melody to hold our hand, in particular the underappreciated 'New Round', which has a Row-Row-Row-Your-Boat vocal circular at various points in the song. And the finale, 'The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton' is easily the most lucid and bizarre of Beck's career despite a history of ending albums with hidden bonus tracks that shouldn't exist because they throw caution to the wind and frequently don't fit the tone of the album proper.
I don't meant to get people too excited about this album. It's not exactly a career renaissance, but it's better than both Sea Change and Guero. Even with the addition of the extras this deluxe edition brings, it's still no masterpiece. The bonus three songs that, if put on the album would have made it more party-like and too similar to Guero, are not better than what was on the "official" tracklisting, while the remix disc is entirely dependent on how much you like remixes and electronic music. I actually don't know what the point of Beck remixes are, since you'll only like them if you expressly like those artists contributing them OR you just want a longer, dancier version of songs that are already danceable. Even David Sitek's remix of a non-danceable track (namely 'Dark Star') only works if you like his production work and/or his band TV on the Radio.
The Information, in its Deluxe Edition, is a fascinating point of discussion for music critics even though, as I said, I feel like it was a miscalculation (Beck seems to have felt the same way, since his new album, Modern Guilt, is an old fashioned, lean-and-mean 35ish minutes of music with a definite cover and tracklisting). If you aren't a hardcore fan (who will want the Deluxe Edition, because, well, they want everything related to Beck), you'd be just fine getting the normal CD version or even stripping all the artifice away and grabbing the music directly off iTunes or the digital music store of your choice.
When all is said and done, we must come down to the point of whether or not all the extra ideas and concepts tied to The Information made it better. Well, just listening to the "project" as a piece of music, they didn't. All the best songs made the "official" tracklisting, in a great sequence, and the extra bits (remixes and videos) are totally inessential. As I just got done saying, you may actually be better off just downloading this off iTunes so you can appreciate the album for what it is as music instead of a new concept for the album as an ongoing "project" that fans participate in. It's not that I hate the idea of an artist putting more, or even some, control of their music in the hands of listeners. It's just that this was a misguided attempt and something that people have been able to do for years. Furthermore, all this extra baggage distracts from the album itself. Which is a solid Beck album, when all is said and done, and one that corrected most of the problems I had with Guero.
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