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Beck

Modern Guilt | DGC
By ZETH LUNDY  |  July 15, 2008
4.0 4.0 Stars
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Ever since his 2002 confessional, Sea Change, Beck’s music has been less absurd and more obliquely melancholic, the sound of pop art confronting itself. On Modern Guilt, his eighth major-label record, Beck and co-producer Danger Mouse craft a subversive summer album that pits narratives of spiritual and existential longing against noise-encrusted beats and dusty old-pop architecture. It’s music for summer nights of muggy confusion and post-sunset soul searching, and when Beck takes the mic, he rocks some straight-up Shiva shit: “To be loved or destroyed/From a void to a grain of sand in your hand.” Beck and Danger Mouse — whose ubiquity is quickly turning him into the alt-Timbaland — handle most of the album’s instrumentation, from the spy guitar that drives “Gamma Ray” to the infectious Doors-ian saloon hop of the title track. Meanwhile, “Chemtrails,” the only song with a live band, salvages the wreck of late-’60s head-psych, all waterlogged and reanimated, with a hazy shade of Pink Floyd pomp. Beck’s falsetto goes glassy-eyed under the spell of Joey Waronker’s drums and Jason Falkner’s bass — torrential reckonings of retro allusion. Modern Guilt is a hot thing of indefinite course, and perhaps, as Beck sings in “Volcano,” an attempt to “make it back into the womb of the world” — not so much to beat the heat, but to become one with it.
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