Beck Stumbles Into an Uncertain Future
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Beck Hansen and Danger Mouse should be a match made in pop heaven. Beck is a genre-busting singer-songwriter who creates his strongest work when bouncing ideas off of equally innovative producers. Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton), the mind behind Gnarls Barkley’s darkly themed soul pop, is one such sound alchemist. Somehow, though, the pair’s most recent collaboration, “Modern Guilt” (Interscope), Beck’s 10th album and the final in his major-label contract with DGC Records, coaxes out everything that is subdued, insubstantial, and inconsequential from its principal creators. But at just under 34 minutes, at least it’s short.
By any normal yardstick, “Modern Guilt” is a perfectly passable batch of moody pop, but it frustrates because the talented musicians who made it are anything but normal. Beck and Mr. Burton are responsible for some of the more musically adventurous pop in recent years, so “Modern Guilt” feels like sitting down to a Nobu Matsuhisa preparation and being served ramen. The tempos stay this side of tepid, the lyrical loneliness wouldn’t be out of place on an emo pop album, and the jaunty melodic sense could easily be used to sell wireless service on a television spot.
No offense to ramen, of course — everybody needs something quick and easy every once in a while — but “Modern Guilt” sounds less like it was made by two forward-thinking musicians than by two men who met in a self-help group. Take lead single “Chemtrails,” for instance. Over a woozy wash of high-altitude organs and stomping drum tracks, Beck sings trippy, amorphous lines about “so many people” and “watching the jets go by / oh, ooh, oh, oh, ooh, oh.” The song is ostensibly concerned with the idea that jets’ vapor trails — called contrails — are not condensation lines produced by aircrafts’ exhaust, but the spraying of chemicals for some secretive purpose (just Google it). It’s the sort of subcultural conspiracy theory that Beck would normally turn into a paranoid gem of postmillennial tension, but here it becomes something as ambient as the Orb, only without the escape-into-yourself trance beat.
The contemporary malaise of “Chemtrails” is echoed in the album’s title track, which touches on the sort of diffuse disappointment in modernity that science fiction writers have explored for decades. “It’s not what I have changed turning into convention,” Beck sings in his affectless voice. “Don’t know what I’ve done but I feel ashamed.” The song bops along to an unwavering drum pattern and a lackadaisical piano line, sounding more like an afterthought from Spoon’s Britt Daniel than a full-fledged Beck track.
It’s an understated confusion that runs through most of the album. Beck, who turns 38 today, explores contemporary metaphysical and personal fears for the future, and lays them over Mr. Burton’s casual productions, which sound like they’re trying not to be noticed. It’s an odd combination, but not odd enough to be interesting. Granted, Beck doesn’t always have to fire off albums of off-kilter word collages and schizophrenic beats, as he did with 1996’s “Odelay” or 1999’s “Midnight Vultures.” But even when he has ventured into more introspective songwriting or more stripped-down productions, as he did on 1998’s “Mutations” and 2002’s “Sea Change,” the music he used to frame his lyrics complemented, clashed, or otherwise worked off his subject matter in some way to forge something beautiful, arresting, or fascinating.
“Modern Guilt” feels more haphazard, as if the disconnect between the music and lyrics might yield some exponentially disoriented effect when it merely sounds disjointed. Mr. Burton’s work here isn’t that different than what he does with Gnarls Barkley, namely sculpting murky, abstract backdrops for a vocalist to explore. The difference is that Gnarls Barkley’s Cee-lo Green is a radically different and infinitely more emotive singer than Beck, who continues to sing in various shades of indifference. When his voice is paired with Mr. Burton’s music, the result is akin to exploring the profound contrasts of beige and beige.
The album isn’t a total failure, merely a disappointing experiment. It works best when Mr. Burton and Beck find some friction, as in the winning “Soul of a Man” and “Profanity Prayers.” A distorted bass line and a synthesizer blast mimicking an electric guitar provide the core rhythmic thrust to “Soul of a Man,” which features Beck singing in a slightly deeper register than the remainder of the album, and sing-speaking his way through a series of free-association orbits of the titular concern. “Profanity Prayers” skips along to a skittish synthesizer groove as Beck sings about being trapped in the limbo of the present. He emotes in fragmented lines that make little sense alone, but together form a ragged whole, like a David Hockney photo collage.
In moments such as these, “Modern Guilt” offers reminders that Beck was once one of pop’s most audacious songwriters. For most of “Modern Guilt,” he’s merely ordinary.