Album Review: Beck - Modern Guilt

Originally published in Soundcheck Magazine (08/05/08)

What happens when Beck, the eclectic, capricious Toys-R-Us kid of rock, realizes he’s gone and grown up all of a sudden? Modern Guilt happens. The stoned-mellow musician still sounds like a kid in a sonic candy store, but he has apparently spent a lot of time looking into the mirror since the days of breaking sexx laws and spawning Satan’s hairdresser. Beck’s music has always been a sonic patchwork of new and old with a bit of chaos sewn in the seams, but Modern Guilt is the Beck album that most radically leans towards, well, the modern.

Despite the neo-lava lamp psychedelia of the first two tracks, there is a fair amount of mechanization at work here. Beck has made a career out of dusting off old relics and making them sound new, but the compositions found on Modern Guilt recall more recent acts like Spoon (“Modern Guilt”) and Thom Yorke (“Replica”, which sounds like a lost cut from In Rainbows in all the right ways and none of the wrong ones).

Only a true adorer of music, not as a system of genres but as an organized reflection of the human emotions, could synthesize the kind of music Beck has over his career. His zeal for his craft always rubs off on the listener and, even here, when he begins doubting his body as it steadily stalks the big four-oh, his laments aren’t self-piteous. Beck lets his listeners laugh along at his modern guilt.

After all, there’s no way the same guy who wrote “Beercan” could complain about “riff-raff” with a serious face, right? Take “Gamma Ray”, where Beck gleams, “And my Chevrolet Terraplane/Going round, round, round”. You can almost see Lester Burnham (from American Beauty) fist-pump as he proudly declares, “1970 Pontiac Firebird. The car I've always wanted and now I have it. I rule!”

All the while, producer Danger Mouse mostly lurks in the background like a shadow, as he should, his seeds sprouting up occasionally in a few of the minimalist string arrangements (I know, that phrase is a bit oxymoronic) or tinny, computerized drum beats like on the aforementioned “Replica”.

It’s important to consider that if Modern Guilt had been the doing of a less-revered artist, it would undoubtedly be considered around the critics’ circle as one of the greatest albums of the year. As it stands, they still might make that claim. But that short, stunted, single syllable we all know as “Beck” automatically raises the bar so high. Maybe this pressure is part of the reason Beck has become so introspective on his new album. But even as he loses his youth, he’s proven he hasn’t lost his youthfulness or, even more importantly, his joy.

-Andy Pareti