BECK - The Information

When Beck Hansen makes a record, it's never by chance, and it's never random.

Paraphrasing the most famous line from an even more famous film, Beck makes offers "you can't refuse". He shuffles his cards of multiple suits and countless values, plays his aces, and often leaves us stunned by how, more than thirteen years after his recording debut, he can still produce albums like "The Information".

If the previous work "Guero" had disappointed some with its compositional weakness and its repetition of the familiar patterns that had brought him widespread success and admiration, this latest work shows how easy it is to be wrong about Beck when you start writing him off as "done".

Analog and electronic sounds, as ever skillfully blended, warm and intense, never cold and distant, blues, folk and hip-hop much more "true to Beck's roots" than his previous record ever was, despite being touted as a kind of career summary.

The point is that Mr. Hansen has found again the thread that, with "Guero", he had vainly tried to pick up again - the one left dangling at the end of "Odelay" (or rather of the "Deadweight" soundtrack) as a possible path for evolution - and, having found that thread again with this new record, he now follows another possible road branching off from that same point.

The road of a more intimate singer-songwriter craft, less unhinged and crazed than his first four works, but still varied and multicoloured.

The comparison that most immediately comes to mind for "The Information", within Beck's by now fairly long discography, albeit with all due caution, is precisely with "Odelay", his best album.

This preamble is to say that with "The Information" the disorienting Beck is back. Once again, there's something for everyone.

As always, the foundations are blues, folk and rap, and we find these elements in their various incarnations and blends with other genres.

In "Elevator Music" there's torn-up, Indian-tinged folk. "Think I'm In Love" flaunts a revival of the light musical, rhythmic and sonic themes of the Sixties and Seventies, a thread that resurfaces in various places; there's the powerful rap/funk/electroclash of "Cellphone's Dead" (the first single), "We Dance Alone", "1000 Bpm".

There's no shortage of unconventional pop songs that are nonetheless impossible to resist, like "Strange Apparition" - a folk tune far more Pearl Jam than Pearl Jam themselves ever managed to be - and "Nausea".

The dazed, clearly psychedelic and seventies-derived blues/pop/rock of "Soldier Jane", "No Complaints" and "Motorcade" would not have looked out of place on "Odelay" itself.

With "Movie Theme" we also get the melodious, poignant folk ballad that starts out as a joke and ends up softening even the old rock heart.

Finally, there's the revival of the music of the fathers, taken apart, reassembled differently and placed in new contexts, as in the closing "Inside Out" or in "Think I'm In Love" itself, where funk and disco music are reshaped into something new, as always happens to every genre in Beck's hands.

Although the record is very long, over 65 minutes, which in other times would have made it a double album, the only part that's genuinely heavy-going and compositionally weaker is the ten-minute-plus suite "The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton", where Mr. Hansen perhaps asks too much of his by now well-proven abilities.

All of it seasoned with the ever-paradoxical electronic sound inserts in acoustic songs, or acoustic ones in electronic songs, childlike little voices, digital bleeps, bells and oriental moods.

It's true that these moments are far less frequent than in his golden years, but having already proven he can pull it off, Beck can now afford to make just about anything sound musical, even the three-tone "missed call" signal of a mobile phone.

Don't expect extraordinary flashes of invention - Beck has already given plenty on that front - but rather music that manages to draw a coherent synthesis from the thousand tiles of the sonic puzzle of the last forty years, with compositional humility (often two chords say more than ten) and a spirit of adventure, despite the splendour and glory of a by-now lengthy career.

Included in the package alongside the CD, at no extra cost, is a DVD with videos for every song on the album. Surreal, fun, very homemade videos, with rigorously vintage effects, once again for anyone nostalgic for that first incarnation of Mr. Beck-Hansen-of-a-thousand-faces.

There are two or three recurring themes: the disco (strictly 70s-80s), the military look, and of course games, parody, childish jokes, just as certain cartoonish characters recur throughout the videos: the astronaut, the bully, the dancing girls. Double the enjoyment.

One last, non-musical mention, which deserves a note given its originality, goes to the packaging.

The album cover is blank and divided into a grid, to be filled in however the buyer likes with a generous assortment of stickers of various sizes included inside.

The set of stickers differs from one copy to the next. The style, at least in the case that fell to me, is extremely seventies (of course it is), very colourful and surreal.

In conclusion, the final verdict can only be positive.

After all, how can you speak ill of an album that makes you want to listen to it again the moment it ends?

Nowadays, colourful, multifaceted works like "The Information" aren't easy to come by.

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10/09/2006