4/5 stars
Beck’s newest release, The Information, sees a return to his old form, if that can be said about the man. Beck has always had a knack for mixing different styles together and coming up with something completely different, but The Information has a distinctly similar feel to some of his earlier work. This is to be expected, since Nigel Godrich, who worked with Beck on Sea Change and Mutations, returned to produce the album.
The Information is one of the most aptly titled albums of late for the overall “Information Age” feel of the album.
In fact, the song “1000BPM” carries such an off-kilter beat that it could easily be assumed that the distorted blarings of a modem were its inspiration. The percussion in the song sounds as if it were sampled from children playing with a pots-and-pans drum set in their kitchen, and the result could not be smoother.
Despite the chaos of the song, Beck manages to talk-rap over it with the correct amount of voice distortion, keeping the lyrics just audible enough to ponder.
The Information has been in the works for three years, the project starting even before Beck’s last release, Guero. The two albums could be no more different if they were a juxtaposition of Al Green and Vladimir Nabokov. If you’ve never heard anything by Nabokov, don’t worry, the best you could do is a book on tape, because he’s an author.
Guero and Information sound incredibly different. Guero had much more pop flair, which was done very well, but songs like “E-Pro” and “Girl” would never fit on the Godrich-produced album. Information relates much more to one of Godrich’s other projects, Radiohead, only with a little more folk.
That’s not to say this album sounds completely different than Beck. Despite the inclusion of a little more electronics and effects than usual, Beck is still obviously the force behind Information. The beats on the more hip-hop songs sound similar to previous Beck outings, only with the stronger electronic spin mentioned earlier.
The strongest song on the album is “Strange Apparition,” a hybrid of The Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Byrds. The song contains the most diversity of verse, and the Southern rock twang Beck uses at the end of the song is not something heard very often by the artist.
Packaged with the album is a DVD of 15 homemade music videos, one for each song on the album. The videos are funny, but the downside is pretty much every one is the same as the last: Beck and a couple of band members standing up, staring at the camera and performing some spastic dance or idiotic action. One video features a man in a bear suit playing the drums, and there’s no way to turn away from that. Everyone wants a man in a bear suit to play drums with them.
The album is a great follow-up to Guero, showing that Beck still has that uncanny ability to create something completely different than his previous exploits. The Information is a must hear.