Beck
Modern Guilt
(DGC, 2008)

Maybe we should have taken Beck seriously last year when he gave us the thumping single “Timebomb”, which merrily proclaimed, “We got a timebomb / We got a timebomb / Tick tick tick tick / Na na-na na.” If only we had listened we wouldn’t have to rectify the disparity between the infectious sockhop of Danger Mouse’s production on “Gamma Ray” while Beck reasons, “Well I can hold hold out for now / With these ice caps melting down.” Early reports about Modern Guilt suggested that we were in for a heavy dose of ’60s-inflected pop, but this isn’t the same carefree dance music that Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs gave us with “Wooly Bully.” Indeed, I got my first listen of this album at a friend’s basement in Brooklyn while seeking respite from a party that was a bummer for a couple of reasons, and while my friend scooped the files off the internet with a gargantuan mouse and pivoted in a busted wheelchair-turned office chair (which gave him the effect of Dr. Strangelove), I remarked that this brand of party music would be perfect for the foul melee that was going on upstairs.

Let’s begin with the easy part. I had hoped that Danger Mouse would return to his hip-hop roots on this LP and that Beck would finally give in and rap over an entire record, an idea that sounded especially good after he took his flow up a few notches on The Information’s “1000 BPM” (I seem to remember that he and Timbaland, after collaborating on a cover of Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” for the Moulin Rouge soundtrack, had considered such a project). But this is no such album. There is not a rap anywhere on it, which is fine, but instead we get this bummed-out alt-rock cousin of Gnarls Barkley with a thin coat of Beck atmospherics.

The plus-side here is that Danger Mouse’s knack for tight pop songs results in a cohesive record: They set out to do a 10-song, 30-minute album and came pretty close (10 songs, 33 minutes), which means few breakdowns, shorter bridges, and certainly none of those hidden noise tracks that used to jolt me from my reverie after dozing off to Odelay or Midnight Vultures. Just when you expect Beck to elevate the songs into the heights of madness that his lengthy bridges are known for, they are cut off, dead; the starkest example is “Walls”, which ends suddenly with no music. Just the word “murder.”

Although the cryptic lyrics aren’t likely to get Beck banned from the radio like poor old Sam the Sham’s “Wooly Bully”, the words are just as difficult to navigate (not to mention the vocals are mixed pretty low and you have to rely on comparing your notes with the transcriptions of error-prone scriveners on lyrics sites). Regardless, Beck has crafted a tight set of interrelated poems, but he’s a lot more disturbed than on his landmark break-up disc Sea Change, and spends a good part of the record looking into an abyss. “You stare into space / Trying to decide the way now,” he says on “Profanity Prayers.” But that’s the least of it. On “Youthless”, “There’s a bottomless pit that we’ve been climbing from / Just to get on level ground.” Safely out of the pit he turns back toward it on “Volcano”: “And I heard of that Japanese girl / Who jumped into the volcano / Was she trying to make it back / Back into the womb of the world? [...] I don’t know where I’ve been / But I know where I’m going / To that volcano / Oh, I don’t want to fall in though.”

Elsewhere on the record he expresses that same desire for the solace of the volcano/womb; he wants to climb into a hole, like on “Replica”, where “We can live in a hollow tree”; or “Soul of a Man”, where he finds himself “Staring down an empty hall / Deep down in a hollow log.” Further desiring life in a log and eschewed responsibility, he suggests, “If we can learn how to freeze ourselves alive / We can learn to leave these burdens to burn.”

The hollow logs are echoed in shape and substance by the brittle bones that Beck describes: On “Orphans”, he “Want[s] to hear what the blind men sing / With their fossils and their gypsy bones.” On the same song he compares his bones to matchsticks. And he concludes “Volcano” (and the entire album) with “I want my bones on the firing line.”

The imagery and music make for an album that is consistently germane, yet at odds with itself: Encouraging us to dance, if we can—“Shake your seasick legs around”—while that timebomb keeps ticking in the background. But while Beck may be paranoid, confused, and carrying some unnamed burden, having “cross[ed] 10 leagues from a Rubicon,” there is simply no turning back. With his Interscope contract fulfilled with the completion of this album Beck is a free agent, so responsibility is his to shrug off. Just hope he doesn’t sleep in that log for too long.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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