Album Review: Vultures: The Best of What Beck Does Best

"Beck" is a magic word. Beck, beck bananna-nanna pho pheck; Beck. The Pied Piper of post-grunge white boys everywhere, Beck Hansen leads us away from the dying city of Rock playing a tune of satire and pastiche. On Midnite Vultures, he eviscerates hip-hop, R&B and even Kraftwerk of their souls, piling the resultant carrion into a tower of intoxicating formal juxtaposition, and finally infuses these styles with his own pink-pants voice. Who would need anything more?

The Beck of 1994 would. Beck's first album, Mellow Gold, was seeped in the highly personal and visceral world of grunge: perhaps the linchpin line of "Loser" was "chokin' on the splinters." The album captured a miserable white-trash vibe within a sample- and distortion-laden sound that reeked of personal "Beercan" experience. It was a slightly grating album that was heavy on engineering but still naive--or at least straightforward. With Odelay and now Midnite Vultures, Beck has left these Mountain Dew-soaked roots for something more rarefied and cosmopolitan. Even his voice seems to have gotten higher. Grooviness has replaced grit, and Beck has moved from the wood-paneled periphery of the music industry to its hollow matrix-like core.

The brilliance of Beck, however, is that his new hollowness rocks. He is doing a very sincere (if idiosyncratic) cover of the history of pop music. When, on "Hollywood Freaks," the most majestic track on Midnite Vultures, the background vocals rap-wail "Jockin my Mercedes/Probably have my baby/Shop at Old Navy/He wish he was a lady," Beck isn't making fun of rap, or even of people who shop at Old Navy. He knows all about this, and he isn't afraid to mimic it. And he hopes all the "Hollywood freaks," "b-boys," girls who "look so Israeli" and whom he saw "at JC Penney" are as cool as he is. All the same, the Kraftwerk-esque Beck who chants "We like the girls/With the cellophane chests" has made a definite turn from grungy regurgitation to playful appropriation, and if it makes Midnite Vultures better than any of his previous albums, it also makes it less personable.

The album begins with the first single, "Sexx Laws." Too twangy and lacking the electricity and, ironically, sexiness of much of the rest of the album, it is followed by the anthemic "Nicotine & Gravy." "I think we're going crazy/Things don't even faze me...Love the way she plays me" goes the chorus, and so goes the album, rambunctiously rhyming away the contradiction of every postmodern fiction. From this point on, the first half of Midnite Vultures maintains its energy with some of Beck's best ever lyrics supported by beats indebted, impressively, to both hip-hop and techno.

The sixth track, "Peaches and Cream," has food and sex on the brain again, and it marshals the R&B sound that was shyly woven into the more frenetic first half of the album. Although this track has a full-bodied sound and great lyrics like "You make a garbage man scream," the next few tracks are the weakest on the album. They're too slow--one of the most important differences between Midnite Vultures and previous albums is the faster tempo that puts several layers of samples and synth between us and Beck's sometimes too languorous voice.

When listening to Midnite Vultures for the first time, it's easy to be overwhelmed by its crackling originality. The album's main fault is that such a hectic blend of music eventually sounds a little thin and is more exciting as an artistic maneuver on Beck's part than as a long-term fixture in a CD-changer. It's the most straightforward (and final) track, in fact, that will probably become Midnite Vulture's best-remembered track. "Debra" is a funk-love send-up; its proto-cheesy sound is so robust that all irony melts away. It's got joy, like the joy Beck had when he was so suddenly confident of "Where It [was] At." The rest of the album approaches the clarity of "Debra," as if Beck is trying on mask after mask until he finds the one that fits. These masks are made out of tin, but they shine; they shine magenta and chrome blue and those are colors nobody has seen since some decade that exists primarily in Beck's mind. Apparently, it was a decade worth revisiting. B+