The Information, the new Beck album, has no set cover: the album sleeve comes with stickers for you to design your own. Each song has a homemade video slapped together on an accompanying DVD. Its 15 tracks are lush, muscular illuminations and wonderfully hazy abstractions. But it's no surprise to anyone following Beck over his last few albums that these sounds are some of the most enjoyable collages you're likely to hear.
Guero was a surprise hit but a boring stop along the Beck highway, a collection of harmless three-minute grooves that hinted at his Odelay heyday but never got too close. It was a fun album but ultimately one whose dots didn't connect. Enter Nigel Godrich, producer-extraordinaire, whose genius had previously helped actualize two of Beck's most starkly beautiful moments, Mutations and Sea Change.
The latest batch from Godrich and Beck falls somewhere between Mutations' tranquil psychedelia and Guero's nimble pastiche of pop, hip-hop, indie rock and electronica. Opener ""Elevator Music"" is a perfect example of why we all love Beck: left-field computer funk beats made complete with goofball rapping and an innocent chorus. ""Cellphone's Dead"" extends the party; B-boy Beck spews endless Beckisms over Godrich's luxurious jumble of synths, scratches, samples and breaks.
It's the thickness of the production that make Beck sound like the superhero he is. Godrich is painstaking and precise but the music comes off as spontaneous as Beck himself. What's left is the best reconciliation yet between Beck's outsider-folk roots and art-funk ambitions.
The spaced-out country pop of ""Strange Apparition"" and ""Soldier Jane"" sound as bittersweet here as they would have on Mutations or Sea Change, but next to the claustrophobic bounce of ""Nausea"" they help form a tangible, three-dimensional figure of an album. It's hard to grasp through the bottomless pit of Godrich's production and the style-hopping between each song, but further listens reveal a complete thought—this album is hardly a jumble of ideas. The Information is calculated and purposeful, but somehow it's as obscure as ever.
Sprawling. Unfocused. Schizophrenic. These were the traits that made Beck's unhinged lunacy sound so perfect on record. His giddy irresponsibility made ""Loser"" and Odelay defining moments of the '90s, cobbling together limitless sounds and phrases into trash-heap masterpieces. But now Beck's volatility isn't so much a quirk as it is his aesthetic. With The Information, it's clear that Mr. Hansen has harnessed his eccentricities and become a real professional. He makes creating albums look easy. But The Information may be the first with this confidently in mind.
