bell-bottoms and macksploitation.
Beck Hansen, born in 1970, knows we're too self-conscious now to party like it's 1978. But on Midnite Vultures, his sixth album (counting indie releases), he takes a twisted time trip back to a decadent era that he was too young to enjoy fully. Clavinets chatter, analog synthesizers boop and slide, guitars wah-wah with horn sections talking back; songs hark back to silky soul and electrobubblegum. Beck doesn't set out to re-create the 1970s, though. He's playing to our current hindsight, distorted and hyperactive and more than a little envious of a time when pleasure didn't automatically bring danger. "I want to defy the logic of all sex laws," he sings in the opening song.
He has changed his strategy. On Mellow Gold and Odelay, Beck surveyed America from the rubble-strewn fringes, gazing from the outside at a culture whose center refused to hold, if it could be found at all. With hip-hop drum loops, folky guitars and a dizzying assortment of samples, he sang about collapse and confusion, about choking on splinters or trying to sell the scraps. Last year's Mutations traded sampling for the sound of his band, stripping away some diversionary layers from his wistful images of decline and exhaustion.
But with Midnite Vultures, Beck isn't standing outside anymore. This time he plays the insider, riding the executive plane through the good life with every need fulfilled. "Satin sheets, tropical oils/Turn up the heat till the swimming pool boils," he raps. He flaunts his California locale, whether he's trying to seduce a girl at a mall near Glendale or hanging out with "Hollywood freaks on the Hollywood scene." He's especially busy putting the moves on the sweet young things, offering a ride on "the good ship menage a trois" and promising to "leave graffiti where you've never been kissed."
When Mutations was released, Beck said that his last album before the millennium would be "a party record with dumb sounds and dumb songs and dumb lyrics." He was misleading about how dumb the songs are - they're not - but the album is definitely party music. Many of the songs have relatives on Odelay; Midnite Vultures includes fuzz-toned riff songs, a deadpan rap, a tune built on plinking tuned percussion and a dreamy, swaying ballad. But on the new album, the arrangements are even more hilariously overstuffed, especially when Beck's keyboardist, Roger Joseph Manning Jr., dispenses wordless wisecracks on instruments that whistle and sputter and blip. In the choruses of "Milk and Honey,
