I've decided to start a new feature here on the MW blog where I review things (movies, music, comics, games, TV) when I feel like it. Odds are, of course, that it'll be quite a while after the item in question is released to the public that I get to review it, since I don't have the inroads (or the money) that apparently so many other people on the internet seem to have, and as such, most of these reviews will be, if not irrelevant, well past their expiration date for being "current." Note that I'm only pointing this out for information's sake. I don't particularly care that it's the case.

Anyway, on to the review:

Maybe I read too many music reviews.

I read what they had to say about this album over on Pitchfork before I ever listened to it -- to put it concisely, they thought it was somewhat derivative of Beck's earlier work, namely Odelay, undoubtedly his most balanced record to date -- and when I first heard it, I more or less towed their line, as quite a few of the songs on the record do have a bit of an Odelay feel (though at least one song -- the half-Spanish, half-rapped "Que' Onda Guero" sounds like a high-quality Mellow Gold outtake).

Luckily, I continued to listen to it and discovered that the album isn't derivative as it were, but that it just isn't stereotypical Beck. That is, it's doesn't come at you from one specific persona. Rather, it's kind of all over the map, which is actually one of its greatest strengths. It's easy to describe Guero as a re-hash of Odelay, not because it is, necessarily, but because it's kind of hard to describe it any other way, at least in terms of Beck's previous work.

This isn't the haggard, world-weary, depressive Beck of Sea Change (undoubtedly his best work to date), and as a follow-up to that album, Guero can be a little hard to swallow at first. But then again, what wouldn't be? The man more or less bared his entire soul for us. There's almost no way to follow that. Hand-claps and nah-nahs and lyrics about a "vegetable man" just don't have that ring of sincerity after you've heard the guy sing a song called "Already Dead."

This isn't the party-guy swinger of Midnite Vultures or the gen-X hip-hopper of Mellow Gold or the acid-folk minstrel of One Foot in the Grave either. It's something of a combination of all those guys, with a little something extra added in. Guero's a tough record to define because its Beck is so hard to grasp. There's a Beck persona in there somewhere, but it can't be described in a hyphenate. That said, this Meta-Beck (okay, maybe he can be described in a hyphenate) pulls out some pretty great songs here, particularly the guitar-heavy first single "E-Pro," the near-tribal new college radio anthem "Black Tambourine," the electro-folkish "Girl" and the all-minor-chords, sad-but-all-too-catchy "Earthquake Weather."

It's kind of hard to be a Beck fan, because as far as I can tell, he's never the same guy twice. As soon as you get used to him being one way, he pulls the rug out from under you and shows up as this whole different character. Guero Beck isn't a whole different character, he's about five or six different characters that we've already seen before. Which, after some thought, makes me think that, maybe this is actually the real deal. It was easy a few years ago to think of Beck as almost schizophrenic, or at least a multiple personality syndrome sufferer. Now, with Guero, it seems that maybe he's just one guy with too many interests.

If you can ignore the fact that he's taken a few steps back on the profundity scale after Sea Change, it's pretty easy to accept Beck's Guero as a damn catchy and nicely varied little record. B+

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