Beck Discography Reimagined 5: Modern Guilt

I feel like people ten years older than me got to talk about how they "knew (they were) old when they stopped listening to the radio or watching MTV for new music." People my age didn't have that luxury as MTV devolved into a reality TV channel, and we were so caught up on the birth of social media and blogging that many of us forgot the radio existed. Some people got involved in the Pandora/Spotify/iTunes war but most of us just hoarded they physical music we'd bought in our twenties and thirties, converted it digitally and started learning about new music exclusively through TV and movie soundtracks.

Modern Guilt is the first Beck album that falls into this category for me. Like Radiohead's post-Hail To The Thief output, I would see someone mention the album was available online, and I would download it directly from the artist's website or whatever non-Amazon site I could find. 

I preferred the new Beck material to the new Radiohead material. It still felt like he was trying to put out something you could have an emotion to, rather than just bleak background music to put on while you wrote about why nobody who loved you ever stayed.

​The drums, the spare guitar riffs, the hey-yay-yays and the da-da-da-da-da-dadas of the title track are the perfect introduction to Modern Guilt. I feel uptight when I walk in the city and some monotonous bloops let you know you’re in a more linear, lyrically straight-forward themed album than some of the previous ones. But it’s still going to be fun, and a little weird.

The low monotone of Dark Star with its spare scratching and Sea Change era chorus haunts We got all we need droning out of a tin can / Thinking about the rain under the sweatshirt hood / Listen to the noise on the battery tape deck / A Judas train wreck, anonymous suspect / Hovering in carbon monoxide cremations while a sample counts the intro in the background.

We’re still crooning downtempo with Volcano. I’ve been drifting on this wave so long / I don’t know / if it’s already crashed on the shore. This is great background music for writing a love story with a depressing ending. You can imagine it showing up in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

The pace picks up a bit for the surf-rocky Gamma Ray. A bop bop cactus crown / with a dot dot dot on her brow. Not a banger, a head bopper.

The mild bopping continues on Youthless. Shake your seasick legs around / Dead of winter in a logo town/ Signs of life are soft and flickering.

A bit of cowbell heralds the beginning of the first actually upbeat song on the album. Strange Apparitions has the salt lick of country that Beck likes to pepper his pop with. This is almost an Odelay track. It has a nice breakdown about halfway through where a piano that was probably built for honky-tonk plays a lovely Beatles melody instead.

Soul Of A Man crunches in like it’s from Midnite Vultures. You could dance to this but it should probably be a very silly looking dance. The lyrics are so spare you wonder if he wrote it ten years previously and held it in reserves for this album. Call a doctor, call a ghost / Put a fire into your bones / Sic a dog on all you know / Cut it loose before you go.

Movie Theme is a hint at what future Beck albums are  going to sound like. Yea, there’s a bit of Sea Change to it but there’s also a Brian Eno atmospheric feel that’s going to become more pervasive in his music as he enters the whisper-singing era of his career.

Given that the song ends with Bye and bye and bye and bye, you might imagine I’d put New Round as the closing track. It has some rondo background vocals that don’t quite feel Beckish. But then the bleeps and bloops take over, and you’re definitely in Becktown.

Apart from the title track, and maybe “Volcano” or “Nausea”, I Think I’m In Love is probably the only song on this album that would pop up on a Beck’s Greatest Hits cd. I love the chimey piano on this track which seems in contrast with Beck’s moody crooning.

Well I'm a sea-sick sailor on a ship of noise / I got my maps all backwards and my instincts poisoned / In a truth-blown gutter full of wasted years / Like blown-out speakers ringin' in my ears / Oh, it's Nausea, oh nausea, and we're gone. I love this warbly little banger.

There’s an almost disco bassline to Cellphone’s Dead that pleasantly bumps Beck’s slightly sung rap. It’s like spare funk with some cowbell and triangle buried in the mix. This is another one that would have been quite comfortable on Odelay. One by one I’ll knock you out.

That track dissolves into the closer, Chemtrails, a very straightforward song about watching clouds. He doesn’t even give them shapes! All I can take / From these skies /Is fog.