By Jordan S. Carroll
One of the few perks of working at the Louisville Cardinal is the freebies. Up until now, though, nothing in my mailbox has outright excited me. Granted, I have had a lot of fun with the weekly KET press releases. Those are a blast. But when I opened up the UPS package with Beck’s latest album, “Guero,” it was a red-letter day.
The first thing that struck me about this CD was the neat packaging. It features art by Marcel Dzuma, who graces the booklet with bats, serpents, a hand puppet, women in half-masks and men sitting on large heads. His spare, surreal mock-children’s illustrations are somewhere between Charles Addams and Harvey Darger and seem to be a perfect fit for Beck.
When I first listened to the CD, I played it over and over five times. Nobody in the office seemed to mind, either. The album is incredibly easy to listen to — but it’s something so indistinct and unchallenging that you can play it repeatedly without noticing.
I’ve become so used to Beck’s inventiveness and experimentalism that I’m disappointed when Beck just sounds like Beck. Beck has moved away from the folksy trajectory of “Sea Change” and back to the electronic sounds of previous albums but it feels more like a retread than a return.
There are still a few standout songs. The title song is by far the best on the album. In “Que Onda Guero,” Beck raps in English and Spanish about a confused street scene. In the background, you can hear whistling, the sound of cars passing, heckling, and a man with a thick accent yapping about ceramics class, Popsicles and James Joyce. The samples work to situate Beck and the listener as amused outsiders in a vibrant cityscape.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s “Farewell Song.” “Farewell Song” features a clanky, plodding beat and Bluesy overtones. The sound works very well, but the lyrics don’t quite live up to it. They come off as repetitive and overly simple when compared to the rest of Beck’s oeuvre.
But even during the memorable songs, the listener can’t help but compare this album to all his others — often unfavorably. “Missing” sounds like a cast-off from “Sea Change”; “Hell Yes” is a hand-me-down from “Midnite Vultures.” While this is definitely worth a listen and any Beck fan should have it in his or her player for the next few weeks, nobody is going to call this the new “Odelay.”
