Album Review - Beck - The Information
John Metzger
After Nigel Godrich helped to turn Radiohead's OK Computer into a
universally heralded masterpiece, he became one of the most sought after
producers in the music industry. The problem, however, is that many
artists hired him under the misguided belief that he was the key to
(rather than an element of) Radiohead's success, and, therefore, that he
could turn anything into gold. Although outings like Air's Talkie
Walkie, Pavement's Terror Twilight, and Paul McCartney's Chaos and
Creation in the Backyard were far from disastrous, the juxtaposition of
Godrich's style with that of his partners wasn't entirely seamless.
Consequently, the beguiling frameworks that he concocted awkwardly
propped up lesser compositions, and in short, some of the material was
more interesting for the textural backgrounds that were employed than
for the actual execution of their otherwise sound concepts. Even
Radiohead suffered a similar fate on its 2003 endeavor Hail to the Thief.
Beck is the one artist with whom Godrich seems to be fully compatible,
and the duo has yet to falter. Like kids in a candy store, they have
pushed each other creatively, and their efforts have yielded a pair of
gems in the love-ravaged Sea Change as well as the death-stalked
Mutations. At first glance, their latest collaboration The Information
appears to be a lesser work, largely because its songs -- even more than
those on Guero -- are reassembled from the components of Beck's prior
endeavors. In particular, Mellow Gold and Odelay are well represented
within The Information's DNA, but, like the pieces to a jigsaw puzzle,
Beck's penchant for both rhythmic patterns and rhyming schemes fits so
perfectly inside Godrich's foreboding and moody atmospherics that what
is created is something both familiar and new.
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