I Ate My DVD Collection

I’m beginning to compile music from artists playing at Siren Music Festival, the festival of the free variety at Coney Island Saturday, 7/19 that I am looking forward to immensely.  I want to get to know bands so I can choose correctly between the two stages that will have acts then.  Bands that I will try to get to know better: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks (like I’m going to miss them anyway), Islands, Ra Ra Riot, The Helio Sequence, Jaguar Love, Annuals, Film School, Parts & Labor, and These Are Powers.  Anyone with a stock of recent albums by these guys shoot them my way if you please.  Reviews of these will probably come in some volume.

I’m a Beck fan, despite the fact that it’s no longer trendy to like him, and I even liked Guero a considerable amount, and didn’t think The Information was too awful.  The one gripe I’ve had with almost all of his albums though, has been that they’re just too long.  I try to appreciate albums from beginning to end, and I take points off personally when it’s a struggle to do that.  I think that the fact that Beck’s brand new album, Modern Guilt, is only 33 minutes long, is a positive stroke, and that alone will bring people back into his camp.

As many know, DJ Danger Mouse, whose genius is becoming more and more universally accepted, produced this album, and though it’s not as obvious as his work with Gorillaz on the awesome Demon Days, it obviously helps, and the tracks that are more unique for Beck (and thus, better songs, because unique Beck = good Beck) are the ones that Danger Mouse had a bigger hand in.

This album isn’t great, but thank God, it isn’t half bad either.  Unlike the great Beck albums of yore, the first track is decidedly not the best on the album – gone are the days of “Loser”, “Devil’s Haircut” and “Sexx Laws”.  The album doesn’t really get going until the last minute of the second track, “Gamma Ray”, when the instrumentation shifts a little.  I had a little “Awww yeah” moment there.  Third track “Chemtrails” is pretty good, as well, and gets way better in the second half.  It’s easily traceable to Mutations, though.

The title track, number four, is the first really good Beck track here.  It’s an insecure shuffle which I really enjoy, and as opposed to afore-mentioned Mutations and Sea Change, sparse instrumentation actually helps drive the pace along, á la Spoon.  The future-hating theme is accentuated by the canned strings in the latter portion of the song.  Fifth track, “Youthless”, is probably the highlight, mostly because, like “Modern Guilt”, it’s a little tough to place among the rest of the Beck catalogue.  It’s closest to Guero, but it moves a bit too fast, and the production’s a bit too slick.  It doesn’t fit Midnite Vultures either, it’s a bit to unsettled.  So here we go, unique Beck.  Awesome.

I’m not going to keep going track-by-track, but I will say that the album keeps going great until the last song, “Volcano”, which drags pretty badly.  But then again, what are you going to do, it’s the last song on a Beck album, that’s what last songs on Beck albums do.  Beck has never been perfect, merely awesome.  Here, he’s not awesome, merely very good.  I’ll take that at this stage of his career; hell, by this point in their career, Pink Floyd had fallen off a bit, so we can cut Beck a little slack.