Beck - Modern Guilt

POP

Beck seems to have found his mojo over the last few albums, the self-conscious idea of him being an ‘artist’ is gone and he lets the ideas flow. Modern Guilt is as sharp, clean and crisp a record as you’ll find, a compact, focussed 33 minutes which reveals a few new expansive twists and turns to his evocative psychedelic strut. Here he sets the strife of global warming and world poverty to an old school R&B shuffle on ‘Gamma Ray’ and routes soft rock bombast through an old moog for the sublime, dreamy ‘Chemtrails’.

This is the sort of thing you’d like from him for the next 20 years; one of these every 18 months, crafting, reshaping and being generally playful with pop forms. Yum.