The Information, Beck’s impressively quick follow-up to last year’s excellent Guero essentially takes up where its predecessor took off. Although Radiohead producer of choice Nigel Godrich oversees the whole venture rather than the Dust Brothers (thus making it a less sample-heavy album) this record continues to veer between two distinct styles – the kind of blues/folk/hip-hop mash-ups that Beck has made his own, and a more melancholy, plaintive type of tune that he has increasingly favoured in recent years (and which, bar the odd slice of mournful acoustica like ‘Ramshackle’, were largely absent on his breakthrough albums, Mellow Gold and Odelay).
The album really kicks off a few songs in with ‘Cellphone’s Dead’, an inspired, upbeat mix of hip-hop beats and salsa grooves. When the following ‘Strange Apparition’ opens with cacophonous percussion (including prominent cowbell), there’s no doubt but that Beck is about to lead us on another fascinating magical mystery tour. However, the most notable aspect of The Information is the undercurrent of anxiety running through the album.
Ten years ago, on Odelay, Beck was all about two turntables and a microphone, and dropping the kind of brilliantly incongruous samples (one thinks of the insane psychedelic funk coda to the blues song ‘Hotwax’) that had you simultaneously up out of your seat dancing and smiling at the gleeful abandon of it all. These days, the blues/hip-hop stompers, such as the first single ‘Nausea’, are as infectious as ever, but as the title suggests, there is a nagging sense of unease lurking just below the surface.
Indeed, the trio of ‘New Round’, ‘Dark Star’ and ‘We Dance Alone’ suggest that Beck, to quote Jarvis Cocker on ‘Party Hard’, was having “a wail of a time before your uncle psychosis arrived”. To what we might attribute this new found sense of paranoia is hard to know. Maybe it’s experience, maybe it’s personal stuff, maybe it’s even that hoary old chestnut “the times we live in”, but Beck certainly sounds spooked on these tracks.
Of course, Beck wouldn’t be Beck without a few moments to bring a smile to your face, and so the old-school hip-hop of ‘1000 BPM’ and the cod-funk of the bonus tracks ‘Inside Out’ and ‘This Girl That I Know’ do manage to leaven proceedings somewhat. Undoubtedly though, the album’s most daring track is the ten-minute suite ‘The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton’. Opening with a percussive rhythm reminiscent of Folk Implosion’s brilliant ‘Serge’, it proceeds to take some fascinating musical detours, before culminating in unsettling, Aphex Twin/Coil style electro ambience, over which Spike Jonze and A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius author Dave Eggers discuss what the perfect album might sound like.
Together with the bonus DVD (a collection of lo-fi, surrealist videos for each track on the album) and the DIY cover art, the track represents a significant throwdown to Beck’s contemporaries: come and have a go if you think you’re avant garde enough.