By Dave Formentin
We all should have expected this. In fact, anyone paying attention the to the tea leaves at the bottom of the Odelay cup could have predicted this kind of arc in Beck’s career. Odelay in itself was a landmark for pop music; it was varied in style, full of samples, and full of passion. Beck’s music career has been just as varied and interesting, but it’s thanks to that variation that we have The Information, an unfortunate misstep that continues the trend started by Guero.
It may have been unrealistic to expect the so-called ‘king of cut and paste’ to deliver every single time. Midnight Vultures was a good-natured pastiche of the kind of pop this generation just barely missed and served as a stepping-stone to Sea Change, unquestionably the highlight of his career. And then there was Guero, painfully uneven and boring, So what happened to Beck?
The Information begins promisingly enough, despite the fact that “Elevator Music” finds Beck rapping again. “I’m In Love” is the best song on the album, by far, but even it drags a little bit. “Nausea,” the first single, is an insult to people who have been paying attention – it sounds exactly the same as “Black Tambourine” from Guero. These are the only songs that stand out of the taupe wall Mr. Hansen has pawned off as music.
Beck is not the zany kid in a Stormtrooper helmet anymore; he’s married and has a child. For two releases now he has been trying to get back to basics, yielding two futile attempts to recreate the grandeur of Odelay. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that Sea Change was his crowning achievement – he had finally matured.
That album had a particular mood, a slow burning letter to love lost that has proven to be a farewell note to Beck the genre-bender from Beck the artist. Just as Guero fell flat as a lackluster effort to change gears, The Information sadly fails to deliver track after track.
The cover of The Information cover is a blank sheet of graph paper, and the package comes with a sheet of stickers for the buyer to create his or her own cover. While this seems like a nice gesture and an interesting idea, it’s actually very telling about the album as a whole – Beck seems to have finally run out of ideas.
