Beck Hansen began his career as a musical magpie, scavenging the bric-a-brac of modern culture and turning it into pop anthems. His 1996 album “Odelay” represented the height of the form, but ever since then, he has been rebelling against abundance in his music. On subsequent albums, he’s limited himself to narrower, if still unconventional, palettes: “Mutations” was spare blues, folk, piano, and Tropicalia; “Midnite Vultures” was high-ironic seventies party funk; “Sea Change” was somber psychedelic folk.

“Guero,” Beck’s eighth album, is a return to his roots – that is, his postmodern rootlessness. The album is produced by the Dust Brothers, who also did “Odelay,” and is a collage of disparate sounds. “E-Pro,” the catchy opening track, layers garage-rock guitar over a sample from the Beastie Boys’ “So What’cha Want.” It’s the only recognizable sample on the album. “Go It Alone,” co-written with Jack White, features Hansen talk-rapping over a satisfyingly simple track of handclaps, snaps, and bass; the results sound a little like a beatnik version of TV On Rhe Radio. “Farewell Ride” is a cowboy funeral march complete with tambourines rattling like spurs. And “Rental Car,” the album’s most topsyturvy track, includes a chorus of Christmas-special claymation elves.

As you might expect of such a bricolage, it doesn’t all work. “Missing” sounds disappointingly like a filler track on a Sting bossa nova album; it and a couple other songs wouldn’t be missed. But the best songs recapture the madcap brilliance that first elevated Beck from busker to hipster pop star. “Que Onda Guero” sounds like a cross between “Loser” and “Left My Wallet in El Segundo.” It finds Beck strolling through a Latino neighborhood to a beat of chopped mariachi horns and the music of the streets. A couple of hilarious vatos tail the guero (white boy) and playfully harass him: “James Joyce… Michael Bolton… que te pasa?… hey Guero, yeah bro…let’s go to Capricorn’s, they have the new Yanni cassette.”

The lyrics are more abstruse than on Beck’s heartbroken 2002 album “Sea Change,” and often just as bleak. But there’s also an aggressive sense of play here that matches that of the music. The best lines sound like John Ashbery updated for the blogging generation. On the vocoder-funk song “Hell Yes,” he raps: “Duck, don’t look now, company missiles/power is raunchy, rent-a-cops are watching/make their dreams out of papier mache/cliche wasted, hate taste tested.”

It’s mature Beck at his best: complex, adventurous, ironic, opaque, and rich with meaning.