Beck Guero CD

"E-Pro" kicks off the festivities with a heavy guitar riff and a Beastie Boys-sampled beat, while "Que Onda Guero" revels in a sunny Latin vibe, with Beck rapping (surprisingly well) in Spanish. However, this outing also offers up MUTATIONS-worthy melodic pop, particularly on "Girl," a brilliantly catchy tune carried along by acoustic guitar, handclaps, and lush vocal harmonies. Beck's reunion with sound sculptors Mike Simpson and John King (the Dust Brothers) breathes plenty of life into these tracks, including the heavily percussive "Black Tambourine" and the '70s-inspired "Earthquake Weather." Jack White (of the famously bass-less White Stripes) lends a bluesy bass line to "Go It Alone," while many of Beck's longtime musicians (guitarist Smokey Hormel, bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen) turn up throughout the record. An album that features Beck energetically jumping back into his renowned cut-and-paste aesthetic, GUERO is sure to please longtime fans, and may win over young listeners who thought that he was primarily a sad-sack folkie.

Ever since his thrilling 1994 debut with Mellow Gold, each new Beck album was a genuine pop cultural event, since it was never clear which direction he would follow. Kicking off his career as equal parts noise-prankster, indie folkster, alt-rocker, and ironic rapper, he's gone to extremes, veering between garishly ironic party music to brooding, heartbroken Baroque pop, and this unpredictability is a large part of his charm, since each album was distinct from the one before. That remains true with Guero, his eighth album (sixth if you don't count 1994's Stereopathetic Soul Manure and One Foot in the Grave, which some don't), but the surprising thing here is that it sounds for all the world like a good, straight-ahead, garden-variety Beck album, which is something he'd never delivered prior to this 2005 release. In many ways, Guero is deliberately designed as a classicist Beck album, a return to the sound and aesthetic of his 1996 masterwork, Odelay. After all, he's reteamed with the producing team of the Dust Brothers, who are widely credited for the dense, sample-collage sound of Odelay, and the light, bright Guero stands in stark contrast to the lush melancholy of 2002's Sea Change while simultaneously bearing a knowing kinship to the sound that brought him his greatest critical and commercial success in the mid-'90s. This has all the trappings of being a cold, calculating maneuver, but the album never plays as crass. Instead, it sounds as if Beck, now a husband and father in his mid-thirties, is revisiting his older aesthetic and sensibility from a new perspective. The sound has remained essentially the same -- it's still a kaleidoscopic jumble of pop, hip-hop, and indie rock, with some Brazilian and electro touches thrown in -- but Beck is a hell of a lot calmer, never indulging in the lyrical or musical flights of fancy or the absurdism that made Mellow Gold and Odelay such giddy listens. He now operates with the skill and precision of a craftsman, never dumping too many ideas into one song, paring his words down to their essentials, mixing the record for a wider audience than just his friends. Consequently, Guero never is as surprising or enthralling as Odelay, but Beck is also not trying to be as wild and funny as he was a decade ago. He's shifted away from exaggerated wackiness -- which is good, since it wouldn't wear as well on a 34-year-old as it would on a man a decade younger -- and concentrated on the record

Standard UK edition of his 2005 album will include two bonus tracks, 'Send A Message To Her' and 'Chain Reaction' * Please note the two bonus tracks are also available on the US CD/DVD limited edition package. Universal. 2005.

This edition of Beck's acclaimed 2005 GUERO features two bonus tracks: "Send a Message to Her" (non-LP version) and "Chain Reaction" (non-LP version)

Beck's sixth major-label album is a stunning return to the anything-goes format of 1996's ODELAY. StandRolling Stone (pp.67-68) - 4 stars out of 5 - "The rhythmic jolt makes the malaise more compelling and complex, with enough playful musical wit to hint at a next step....On GUERO, he finds a way to revitalize his musical imagination..."
Spin (p.64) - Ranked #11 in Spin's "40 Best Albums Of 2005" - "Los Angeles plays itself: the noise of traffic, boom boxes, curbside Spanglish, mariachi music -- the sound of what it's like to be an outcast even in an outsider's hood."
Spin (pp.97-98) - "[A] return to his most popular trick: digging up cool grooves and noises from far-flung neighborhoods and throwing a party where the whole city can get down and make out." - Grade:B
Entertainment Weekly (p.140) - Ranked #2 in Entertainment Weekly's 'Top Ten Records of the Year' -- "[H]e's learned that kaleidoscopic music that digs deep into blues, bossa nova, and electro keeps everything marvelously grounded too."
Entertainment Weekly (No. 813, p.66) - "[GUERO] is the first record on which the many moods and sides of Beck co-exist, and it's about time." - Grade: A-
Uncut (p.100) - 4 stars out of 5 - "Here, again, is where fat dusty beats meet keening bottleneck scrapes....As another installment in the guy's ongoing dialectics, it's as welcome as anything he's done."
Alternative Press (p.132) - 5 out of 5 - "'Rental Car' has a dilapidated bass line that's White Stripes-worthy....And let's not overlook 'Hell Yes,' which brings Beck together with Neptunes-ish beats for a broken hip-hop revival. Long live the king of hip."
Magnet (p.85) - "Remarkably, the shifts in tone and mood only serve GUERO in the end, proof that stepping back to enjoy the broad picture can be just as rewarding as focusing on one detail at a time."
Vibe (p.142) - "[E]ssentially a sequel to his '96 sample-heavy opus."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.92) - 3 stars out of 5 - "'Missing' with wistful melody, swooping Melody Nelson strings, beautifully minimal bass and bossa nova guitar, is a jewel that takes Beck's sonic kleptomania to a new realm."