Beck - "The Information"

I don't feel like uploading any songs for you right now, but I just (finally! After working on it for the past nine hours!) finished my review of Beck's new album for my school paper. And I wanted to share. Please please leave any comments you might have - it'll be edited this week, so any feedback would be nice.

Beck – “The Information”

Beck can do anything. Beck can be anything – from a grunge god to a father, a rock star to a rapper. Each album seems wildly different from the next. Compare Mellow Gold (1994), Beck’s first album that launched ‘slacker anthem’ “Loser” into the world, to the soft and romantic lullabies of Sea Change (2002). Beck turned from the smooth and clear production of Nigel Godrich (Mutations, Sea Change; also best known for his work as Radiohead’s producer) to the scratchy sampling and production of the Dust Brothers on Guero and Guerolito. Beck’s seventh (well, eighth, if you count the remix album Guerolito) full-length album, The Information, released October 3, is arguably his best album to date. Godrich has returned as producer to help create some perfectly blended songs, mixing and overlapping flawless melody with rapping and singing and tons of different instruments and sounds on each separate track.
The opening track of The Information, “Elevator Music”, is reminiscent of last year’s Guero. Much of the song is made of repetitive electronic drumbeats and Beck’s quick, obscure rapping, filled with oblique lyrics like “Gutbucket and a bottle of paint” and “I got a silicon bible song / Paranoid Jumbotron”. At the end of the track, Beck’s rhythmic “Na na na na”’s collide with telephone beeps, ringing, dialtones, and a bizarre electronic comet-y sound. Every Beck album has at least one or two of those obnoxiously catchy songs that you’ll keep humming aloud to yourself days after you hear it – Midnite Vultures’ “Sexx Laws”, Guero’s “E-Pro”, Odelay’s “Devil’s Haircut” – and The Information is no exception with “Think I’m In Love” and “Cellphone’s Dead”. “Cellphone’s Dead”, the third track on the album, is especially notable – who else but Beck could have a single song incorporating techno, rap, children chanting “One by one I’ll knock you out”, along with background samples of Abba’s “Dancing Queen”?
Analyzing each song would take pages more than what the Postscript has to offer, so some other highlights of the album: the pounding, almost White Stripes-esque piano melodies of “Strange Apparition”; the refreshingly simple (compared to the other super-layered tracks, at least) “No Complaints”, and the wonderfully ambiguous and lovingly apocolytic lyrics that run through the entire album. Oh, and the last two minutes of the second-to-last song on the album are filled with director Spike Jonze and writer Dave Eggers philosophizing about the “ultimate record that could ever possibly be made.” That has to count for something.
I don’t know if this review made sense. It seems almost impossible to describe Beck without using way too many adverbs and hyphens. There are so many things one can say about this album, from the instrumentals to the vocals to particularly the overall mixing and sound of the songs, and I’m finding it extremely hard to accurately convey all of this through simple, two-dimensional words. Hopefully one thing that came through is the fact that The Information is good – I mean, really, really good – because in the end, no one really pays attention specifically to the production quality or the separate noises of each track. All that really matters is that it sounds good.