Music

[Alternative Rock]

Beck

Modern Guilt

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When the creative well runs dry, what’s a musical mastermind to do? Well, if he’s anything like Bob Dylan, grind away and hope the spark returns, as it did for Dylan in the late ’90s after a long period of muddled mediocrity. Or he can take a more drastic route, say that traveled by Miles Davis, who retired for more than five years when he sensed his best innovations were behind him.

Beck—who doesn’t merit mention alongside Dylan or Davis but once seemed as if he someday might—has opted for the former path, churning out a pair of tolerable-but-hardly-groundbreaking albums since 2002’s folky despair narrative Sea Change. Those LPs, 2005’s Guero and 2006’s The Information, smacked of desperation, the one-time alterna-rock boy wonder cribbing from his own greatest success, 1996’s Odelay, but fooling almost no one into confusing the catalog filler with his best work.

Even before its hasty summer release, new disc Modern Guilt was being hailed as Beck’s return to form, largely on the strength of June single “Chemtrails,” a beautifully gloomy cut that suggested a psychedelic new direction. Sadly, that’s not quite the case, but Guilt does improve on its two predecessors by looking in new directions even as it steals backward glances.

In-demand producer Danger Mouse, who wrests the studio seat from usual Beck cohorts Nigel Godrich and the Dust Brothers, likely deserves credit for the upgrade, if not for his engineering wizardry than for his fresh perspective on his collaborator’s career. Though a few tunes (“Orphans,” “Soul of a Man,” “Profanity Prayers”) play like reruns in stretches, most of the album’s cuts—most notably groovy garage throwback “Gamma Ray,” synthy dance gait “Youthless” and glitch-electronics-backed closer “Volcano”—sound dramatically different from anything Beck has recorded previously, and that’s what his fans are really all about.

Can we proclaim the drought over? Is Modern Guilt Beck’s Time Out of Mind? Not quite (it’s only 33 minutes long, for one). But it’s no reason for him to call it quits, either.

The bottom line: ***1/2

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