Old-school Beck fans rejoice - The Information finds Beck Hansen in goofy mood for the first time since Midnite Vultures, chucking out inspired wisecracks and surrealist couplets like the sombre, acoustic-tinged moods of 2002's Sea Change never happened. Produced by sometime Beck collaborator Nigel Godrich, last seen working on Thom Yorke's The Eraser, The Information is a strange mix of bluesy Americana rootsiness, wonky hip-hop beats and cosmic synthesiser, all wound together in accordance with Beck's fried, futuristic, utterly individual vision. Most importantly, it's enjoyable and instantly accessible. The opening "Elevator Music" recalls the free-wheeling spirit of "Where It's At", all rolling beats, clacking Tropicalia scraper and distant melodica, while the excellent "Cellphone's Dead" imagines "Voodoo curses, Bible tongues/Voices coming from the mangled lungs" atop a track that veers between squelchy hip hop and Screamadelica-style acoustic strum. And sure, it gets weird - see the broiling, funky cyberpunk narrative "1000 BPM" ("Telemarketing people with cellular headsets on their skulls/Selling you wisdom from a plexiglass prism,") or the 12-minute finale "Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton", which ends with a hushed conversation about travelling into space, possibly born of Beck's membership of Hollywood celeb-religion Scientology - but the out-there moments bookend some of Beck's finest, funnest material in years. If you lost him for a bit there, now's time to tune back in. --Louis Pattison
Beck
The Information
[Interscope; 2006]
Rating: 6.9
During the bizarre final minutes of Beck's ninth album, director Spike Jonze and author Dave Eggers philosophize about what the "ultimate record that ever could possibly be made" would sound like. "[The songs would] change depending on what mood you're in," imagines Jonze. "Or, depending on when you listen to them at a different age, they'll mean something different." In many ways, Beck's discography embodies this idyllic malleability; from the sullen strains of Nick Drake to food'n'sex funk to broken-down blues to awkward boho-beat hip-hop, his oeuvre is a one-stop shop-- emotionally and sonically-- that defied stagnation for more than a decade. But his track record took a hit with last year's Guero, the first Beck album that cited Beck as its primary musical influence.
Ultimately, the same can be said for The Information, which is made from a similar scattershot, self-referencing pastiche. But there are key variations that give the new album a cohesion its predecessor lacked. This time, über-producer Nigel Godrich is the main collaborator, and his psychedelic studio wizardry one-ups the Dust Brothers' sample-based concoctions at nearly every turn. The record also benefits from a future-sick quasi-concept worthy of Philip K. Dick (or Thom Yorke). While still lyrically cryptic (sometimes maddeningly so), Beck injects many tracks with the distress of an attuned cultural observer raising a child in an age of phony wars, data saturation, and government-sanctioned apathy. The deadpan delivery remains intact, but his anxiousness and anger are more pointed than before.
Over a brisk groove, Beck states his frustrations on opener "Elevator Music", a damning critique of prettified American culture. The song details the troubling unreality of modern times, where the public is relegated to "fly on the wall" status, distracted by media overflow and the nine-to-five grind. "When you're down and out, pounded, and there's nothing that's real/ It's like a plastic heart too amputated to feel," raps Beck. His trademark spoken-word rambles are still rhythmically challenged and verbose, but, in context, the unorthodox flow can offer a vulnerable counterpart to the scathing precision of lines like, "If I could forget myself/ Find another lie to tell/ From the bottom of an oil well/ Cell phone's ringing to talk to my brain cells." As with most Beck songs, meanings are fluid, imprecise, and listener-specific, and The Information's strange wordplay lies somewhere between the straightforward heartbreak of Sea Change and the non-sequitur absurdity of Odelay. While the music sometimes suggests the manic hodge-podge of his mid-90s material, there's no more getting "crazy with the cheese whiz." Nearly ever word on The Information has a distinct purpose.
Whether quoting the robot strut of Herbie Hancock's "Chameleon" on "Cellphone's Dead", driving a trippy krautrock beat through the title track, or scratching up the hallucinatory dub of "We Dance Alone", The Information pumps musical life into its references thanks to Godrich's space-age sheen. Yet, this upbeat liveliness is often subverted by Beck's increasingly hopeless obsession with death and decay.
With its graveyard calisthenics, windshield-wiping reaper, and roving coffin, 1994's "Loser" video made this particular preoccupation clear early on. But back then, at age 23, Beck was laughing at death and vouching for the sexiness of the netherworld. Now, at 36, there's little room for such frivolousness. Multiple appearances of words like "desert," "cremation," and "dust" ground The Information in stark morbidness. And the once-favored devil has been replaced by a more sinister "lord" who will "take his motorcade and drive us into the dirt." Religious cynicism and technological paranoia meet on "The Information", an unforgiving apocalyptic vision: "When the information comes we'll know what we're made from," sneers Beck. Elsewhere, the ill-fated "Soldier Jane" lies comatose at best, and, whispering on the slow motion ballad "Dark Star," Beck sees the American dream perishing at the hands of misguided warmongers: "A widow's tears washing a soldier's bones/ Sterilized egos, delirium sequels/ Punctured by the arrows of American eagles." Meanwhile, the album's most haunting eulogy ditches political commentary for something more personal.
Quiet and forceful, "New Round" sounds like a gift from father to son. "Every little step/ Every new direction/ The closer you will get," sings Beck, taking full advantage of his underappreciated vocal timbre. But, instead of ending up as yet another sappy "dad" song, "New Round" looks ahead to the inevitable disconnect between parent and child. "And farther away/ You'll go from where we are," he continues. Backed by spare acoustic guitars and a calm break beat, the harrowing love letter exudes a fierce passion missing from other parts of The Information.
While his lyrics offer few solutions to the current onslaught of ones and zeros, Beck encourages user-side involvement by offering blank cover art and a sheet of stickers that fans can arrange how they please (possibly a tribute to his grandfather, a founder of the similarly democratic 60s art movement Fluxus). But participation is also required to comb through the album's low points-- as in deleting the duds from your iPod. "Strange Apparition", on which Beck does a warbling Chris Cornell impression over rollicking Rolling Stones piano, is too boisterous when stacked against the album's stealthy charms. "Motorcade", on the other hand, is barely there; it's a soured tangerine dream, reliant on Godrich's aural doodads and little else. And, although Beck and friends goof around on the accompanying DVD (featuring super lo-fi videos for every song), it looks like the type of project that's more fun to make than it is to watch.
After Jonze gives his take on the ever-changing super album at the end of disc, Eggers politely disagrees. "I don't like it when they change, it frightens me," he admits. "It makes me feel like someone's pushing me from below, trying to turn me over and put me down." As he edges close to middle age, Beck is stuck between the spontaneity of old and a safer middle ground. Although The Information contains some of his most aware, intriguing lyrical head-scratchers yet, the familiar musical settings are something of a letdown from an artist famous for complete reinvention. "Thought I saw a ghost but it might have been me," he raps on "We Dance Alone", "might have been a world that was moving too fast, caught up in a future that was drunk on the past." It always used to feel like Beck was years beyond us but, as The Information attests, the universal struggle is finally catching up with him. Took long enough.
-Ryan Dombal, October 04, 2006
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Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Beck began work on 2006's The Information after Sea Change but before he reunited with the Dust Brothers for 2005's Guero, eventually finishing the album after Guero was generally acclaimed as a return to Odelay form. So, it shouldn't come as a great surprise that The Information falls somewhere between those two records, at least on sonic terms. Musically, it's certainly a kindred spirit to Guero, meaning that it hearkens back to the collage of loose-limbed, quirky white-boy funk-rock and rap that brought Beck fame at the peak of the alt-rock revolution, with hints of the psychedelia of Mutations and the folk-rock that was the basis for Sea Change. Since this is a Nigel Godrich production, it's meticulous and precise even when it wants to give the illusion of spontaneity, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, since it also pulls the album into focus, something that the generally fine Guero could have used. Guero had many strengths, but its biggest weakness was the general sense that it was unfinished, a suspicion fostered by its endless issues in deluxe editions and remixes. Beck embraced these changes, most extravagantly on the cover of Wired, where he was hailing the future of the album, which would now no longer be seen as finished: it would be a project that covered a certain amount of time, the artist would package it one way, then listeners would offer their own spin. That is precisely what Guero turned out to be, so it would have made sense that The Information would run further down that field, particularly because it has a design-your-own-art for its cover and is supplemented by a DVD filled with quick-n-dirty videos for each of its songs. But Beck isn't so easily pigeonholed: as it turns out, The Information is far more of a proper album than Guero, coming fully equipped with recurring themes and motifs, feeling every bit the concept album Sea Change was. Credit might go partially to his collaboration with Godrich -- who is nothing if not a taskmaster, helping to sharpen and focus erratic talents like Paul McCartney and Stephen Malkmus (for good in the former, not as good in the latter) -- but this also feels like the work of a refocused Beck, who shook off the cobwebs by reuniting with the Dust Brothers, thereby getting his "return to Odelay form" notices out of the way, and then getting down to the real work here on The Information, as he tackles the hyper-saturated info-world of the new millennium here.
If it initially seems like surprises are in short supply on The Information -- even when the tracks take a left turn, it doesn't feel like Beck and Godrich are wandering off the map -- the craft is strong and assured, and closer listens reveal the depth of the detail within the album, whether it's in the construction of the production or how those productions illuminate Beck's themes. Ever the obscurist, Beck's meanings aren't always crystal clear, which is no doubt deliberate, but his overall intent is easier to ascertain, especially when "Cellphone's Dead" juts up against "Nausea." There's a greater sense of craft here, and while craft isn't necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about Beck, it's what happens when an eccentric sticks around for over a decade: he turns pro. He's done his exploring and now he's learning how to apply what he's discovered. While this may have the inevitable side effect of making his music a little less bracing and exciting, at least on first listen -- and that's especially true when he's in his pop chameleon mode as he is here, since it often seemed like his collages were quickly thrown together instead of immaculately assembled as they are here -- it nevertheless makes for a well-constructed, intriguing, and satisfying album, which The Information assuredly is. Upon first listen, it might seem to slide by a little bit on texture and sound instead of song, but that doesn't necessarily mean it feels even as groove-oriented and hip-hop-driven as Guero (let alone Midnite Vultures), despite the fact that many of the best tracks are built on muscular, intricate rhythms, like the dense, paranoid "Nausea" or the opening fanfare of "Elevator Music." But those further listens -- something that a neo-concept album like this demands anyway -- reveal the complexity within the productions, and how Beck is bridging the two sides of his personality, finding a common ground between his folk roots and art rock sides. All those little details give each cut a dramatic flow, and as the cuts pile up, they all add up to something. Like a picture where you have to stare intently to find the hidden item buried in a seas of colored dots, it can be far too easy on The Information to look at the individual dots and not see the big picture -- but at least here the dots are interesting in and of themselves. And if you give it time, The Information eventually reveals itself as Beck's tightest, most purposeful album yet.
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