Beck

Maybe Scientology isn't so bad after all. Since Beck joined the cult a few years back, he's been unstoppable, releasing what I would argue was the best album of his career with last year's Guero and following it up just a year and a half later with The Information, a record so dense and mind-bending it's got to include hidden messages about thetans, dianetics and God knows what else.

The most interesting thing about The Information is that it fuses the funky, junky vibe of Beck's two Dust Brothers-produced albums, Guero and Odelay, with the more melancholy, introspective vibe producer Nigel Godrich helped him achieve on his two most conventional-sounding albums, Mutations and Sea Change. Here, for the first time, Beck gives Godrich the keys to the Dust Brothers' cluttered storage unit of samples, scratches, found noises and rusty synths. The result is an album that retains the somber insularity of Sea Change even as it explodes in a million different directions with the biggest appetite for sonic adventure Beck has shown since his sloppy, self-produced 1999 album, Midnight Vultures.

The biggest problem with The Information is that, for all its fascinating sonic landscapes, it's not Beck's strongest set of songs. There are a few gems, especially a pair of beautifully constructed psychedelic rock anthems, "Strange Apparition" and "Soldier Jane." But too many tracks rely on Beck's awkward, white-boy rapping, which is long on dense, hallucinatory imagery but short on any real sense of rhythm or flow. Occasionally, as on the swampy, shuffling "Nausea," he gives himself a musical backdrop that's less hip-hop and more talking blues, and then his breathless, beat-poet chanting actually works. Elsewhere, as on "1000 BPM," he borders on irritating.

Still, Beck seems incapable of making a bad album, and even on this set's weaker songs ("Cellphone's Dead," "Dark Star"), he and Godrich build such dense, atmospheric layers of sound that it hardly matters whether there's much melody there to hang your hat on. You'll be too busy sifting through the pastiche of colliding musical styles to notice. The Information might be the least accessible album Beck has made since his early, Mellow Gold days -- not to mention his most ambitious. And even though not all of it works, Beck's failures are still a few orders of magnitude more interesting than almost anything else out there. - Andy Hermann

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. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide