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Beck jams those dissonant sounds

by Jon Garelick

Beck's Odelay was a release from the post-Kurt hangover (never mind "Jeremy") the way the Beatles were a release from the JFK assassination. Worried about being a faker? Man, this guy was cool -- he could do anything, get by on less than nothing or, at most, two turntables and a microphone. Forget sampling -- all of American pop was his laboratory. When the former king of slackerdom emerged in his Odelay tour as a high-steppin' soul man, the transformation didn't seem absurd -- it seemed inevitable.

Now, after a detour into indie folk rock on Mutations, Beck the soulman is back on Midnite Vultures (Geffen), married to pure pop. The gospel soul falsetto is in high gear throughout the album. Rather than being sample-happy, it revels in live sounds: live strings, backing choruses, horn sections, clavinet, guitars. He's still jamming disparate sounds -- the "Sexx Laws" single starts with a '70s TV-detective-show horn chart and ends with a mix of banjo and soaring steel guitar. Sometimes it still sounds as if he were trying to suck the whole world through a single song -- the break of warped na-na-nas and strings and the Far East pile-up coda of the otherwise simply funky "Nicotine & Gravy." All of which would get labored after a while except that Beck keeps it all coming so fast, one surprising little detour after another -- fuzz bass and fuzz guitars, Fender Rhodes-keyboard funky noodling and baby-grand declamation. Guitars do the Curtis Mayfield wah-wah funk ("Mixed Business"), the big-guitar-and-cowbell hook ("Peaches & Cream"), the Captain Beefheart atonal break ("Broken Train"), even some genuine Johnny Marr ("Milk & Honey"). Vocals get rapped, pinched, and double-tracked. The Prince comparisons aren't out of place, even when it's chipmunk Prince, like the end of "Hollywood Freaks" ("Do you want to feel this").

The spontaneous details (that banjo! that funky clavinet!) are married to a song sense as sure as any in pop -- the master craftsman at the hit factory meeting the idiosyncratic indie-rocker. Sit down with your Beck lyric sheet and listen to the way he mixes and matches verse and chorus, writes a nifty little two-part bridge, or throws in that little shout-out chorus near the end of "Hollywood Freaks."

Odelay was about getting by on nothing but two turntables and a microphone -- or as he put it in "Sissyneck": "I don't need no wheels/I don't need no gasoline." If Midnite Vultures is about anything, it's about prosperity to excess. Just look at the titles: "Peaches & Cream," "Milk & Honey," "Nicotine & Gravy." "Hollywood Freaks" cruises along like a playa's pimpmobile on Beck's wordplay: "Hot milk mmm tweak my nipple/Champagne and ripple shamans go cripple/My sales go triple."

The album's masterwork is "Debra," a slow-jam loverman ballad that plays with sincerity like a cat with a lava lamp. Crooning in his most heartfelt falsetto (when he's not dropping into a near-spoken Prince spiel) over horns and keyboards and flicking guitars, Beck pursues a girl he met at J.C. Penney ("I think your name tag said Jenny"), col'-steps her with a pack of gum, promises he wouldn't do her cheap, invites her to step inside his Hyundai for a ride up to Glendale, and with his most ecstatic "Oh girl!" goes into the big pitch: "I wanna get with you/And your sister, I think her name's Debra." That's soul-man sincerity for you, Beck-style. If Midnite Vultures is about anything, it's about second helpings.

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