Midnite Vultures CD

Beck is back with an album certain to reshape the form of modern music in his unique style. Beck's artful blend of everything and the kitchen sink is a modern music style that defies simple description. The only categories he easily fits into are hugely popular and critically acclaimed, as evidenced by the success on both fronts of his previous releases Mellow Gold, Odelay, and Mutations. With a visual style as messy and maddening as the musical foundation, Midnite Vultures is hardly for the faint-hearted or, indeed, anyone seeking consistency within individual songs, never mind an entire album. Beck Hansen snatches up threads from all kinds of directions, with the result that the record tends not to make consistent sense from one minute to the next - "Mixed Bizness" (the subject of a remix contest that left dozens of different versions floating around the Internet) begins with a howl of massed synthesizers over thumping drums straight out of "Honky Tonk Women," blasts through a variety of styles, and finally fizzles in a morass of new-psychedelic twiddling, only to give way to another styistic leap for "Get Real Paid," which then bounces around further. By the time you reach the oddball folk haven of "Debra," with its Tyrannosaurus Rex touches, the effort of staying with the album proves exhausting. It really is the sort of record to take in small doses over a period of time. Lots of good stuff, but it tends to be obscured by the hopscotch style game.