Beck grows up on Guero

Hyped as a return to old form, Guero, Beck’s eighth album and his first since the less eclectic, beautifully melancholic Sea Change, is filled with the hip-hop grooves, samples, and ironic white-boy raps that were the hallmarks of his genre-melding masterpiece Odelay. This latest offering, however, is hardly a simple rehashing of Beck’s Odelay days. Guero lacks the frenetic energy and youthful playfulness of that album, and Beck seems less concerned with catching his listeners by surprise with frantically shifting sonic bombardments. Here Beck seems to focus on getting the most out of an idea or riff instead of simply splattering them loosely onto his canvas. Thus the songs of Guero, like those of Sea Change, follow a more traditional song structure (relative to Beck’s other work), and, while the influences of his great 90s albums are readily apparent, Guero is as much a product of his Sea Change songcrafting as it is a “return to form.”

Other albums aside, Guero is a mixture of folk-rock, hip-hop and electronica elements molded into 13 cohesive songs that range from dance-rap (“Hell Yes”) to country-western balladry (“Farewell Ride”). The first single “E-Pro” is built up from a catchy fuzz guitar riff and a chorus of la-la-las that, when combined, immediately take up residence in the listener’s head for days at a time. “Que Onda Guero” features Beck’s folk-rap vocals spitting Spanglish over a horn-laden beat that could easily have come from a Gorillaz album. The song is filled with dialogue breaks, which, in typical Beck style, reference everything from James Joyce to Yanni. “Girl” is basically an upbeat track from Sea Change, driven by acoustic guitar, hand-claps, and Beck’s well-backed crooning.

Nowhere on the album is Beck more delightfully ridiculous than on “Hell Yes,” which features regular robot vocals a la “Where It’s At.” Even this song, however, maintains a constant groove and is altogether mellowed out. In that regard, “Hell Yes” is indicative of the stance of the entire album. Beck is still seamlessly integrating disparate styles and elements, but he’s just not as in-your-face about it. Odelay and Midnite Vultures commanded attention and demanded that the listener be as adventurous as the songs he was hearing. Guero is content to let the listener come to it. It can be played in the background. That doesn’t mean, however, that you won’t bob your head unconsciously while it plays, and it certainly doesn’t mean you’ll find it any less great of an album when you approach it with more critical ears.

Overall, Guero is a surprisingly unsurprising next step for the constantly changing, amorphous Beck. It’s Odelay filtered through Sea Change and chilled. It features the best of what Beck is best at – wonderful songwriting, catchy beats and a trademark experimentalism. While the end result is not as purely genius as some of his previous gems, Guero stands on its own as a brilliant album by one of the most important artists in recent memory.