Modern Guilt

Your starter for ten: Beck – craftsman or charlatan? True grit roots futurist or flitting dilettante? Is there a difference, and if so, does it matter? After all, one must beware of false pop preachers, wolves in sheep’s fleece bearing bogus notions of authenticity. Popular music is a shuck and a sham, but that doesn’t preclude the odd moment of transcendence either.
‘Fess up time. Beck lost me a good six or seven years ago. I was an ardent admirer of those early albums, especially Mellow Gold, which suggested an impish, inventive, irreverant mind at work, but to be honest I never felt the same way about the guy’s music after interviewing him for the Midnite Vultures record, when he struck me as a dull and defensive individual, despite being surrounded by fawning PR folk and adoring Euro-journos. Mind you, he was suffering from a bad cold.
Okay, you confuse the dancer with the dance at your peril, but that bad hair day encounter confirmed nagging misgivings about a certain smugness, an aloofness rather, inherent in Hansen’s music.
By contrast, 2002’s Sea Change was an uncharacteristically explicit graph of a heartache, and was all the better for it – but still, it was with a certain detachment that I approached his eighth major label album Modern Guilt, an eclectic (verging on incoherent) collection produced by Danger Mouse, with contributions from Cat Power.
We all have our musical prejudices; my problem with Modern Guilt is I can only take Beck’s penchant for clinical cleverality in small doses, and the things he does best – beatbox blues hollers, hazy tropicalia, crestfallen ballads – are largely absent. There are many interesting moments, not least in the low-grade psychedelia of ‘Orphans’, ‘Replica’ and ‘Chemtrails’, all of which suggest David Axelrod, Van Dyke Parks, Pink Floyd and Radiohead, often in the space of eight bars. Elsewhere, the title tune and ‘Gamma Ray’ are souped up blues shuffles filtered through an anti-folk lens, contrasting quite nicely with the sweeping folk melodies of ‘Walls’. There’s imagination aplenty: overdub assemblies like found art collages, polyglot pop suss, the sonic equivalent of a kid with a Lego set (‘Youthless’, ‘Profanity Prayers’). But really, not much that Beck hasn’t done before, and better. The electro plod of ‘Soul Of A Man’ only serves to remind that the Blind Willie Johnson spiritual of the same name is infinitely simpler and more moving.
The ultimate irony is that Modern Guilt sounds mostly like a very average eels record (Mark Everett was tagged as the new Beck when Beautiful Freak was released), and to be frank, there’s more undiluted soul in one line of Daisies Of The Galaxy or Souljacker than this album in its entirety.

Key Track: ‘Walls’