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Modern Guilt... First Impressions...

Cmor — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 20:57:53 GMT

Modern Guilt has stopped me cold... It keeps us old, never doing what we're told... It's a fold in the cosmic dollar bill, as we get rolled toward tomorrow... And sorrow is but a rental with which we bitch and borrow... Modern Guilt isn't all that new... It's the guilty ones who need a novelty...

Hell of a way to start a review, that's for sure... Poetry can be a defense mechanism for me, or a way to attempt a translation of the enigmatic and profound unfound... It's often when I throw randomness at a question mark, the words arrange themselves into the wisest potential for a phrase... Call it creativity or call it blindfold marksmanship... Some things are easily explained... But when life becomes the great mystery that it can be, I retreat behind riddles to understand... Beck's new album, 'Modern Guilt' has me resorting to poems yet again...

I picked it up at my local indie record store, on the day it came out... Tuesday, July 8th, also happens to be Beck's birthday... It was a day full of promise, and I had cleared all of my day's agenda to absorb the album completely into my consciousness... I was wide open, as Beck has never done me wrong... I imported it into eyetoons and sat down with my headpones and the lyrics...

I have been reeling ever since... Not in a bad way, but a very disassociated way... Like fully embracing the incredibly beautiful songs would be right and wrong all mixed up... There is an air of invitation with every tune, which allows a listener to cozy up comfortably to the message... The melodies remind me of old Turtles or Beatles or Nick Drake resurrected on a sacred turntable... The rhythms are stellar, the production is nearly the best yet... But something... something...

The words take me from the lap of musical luxury into a foggy basement of 'Should I be better or I should be me?' It never really implies that I am the guilty one, in fact its likely Beck playing scapegoat for all of us citizens... Still I find it difficult to escape the Modern Guilt trip placed upon me by myself...

Please don't get me wrong in all this... I absolutely love this album! I know it will one day be among my favorites, so resting in this unrest is an imortant part of the process... Believe me, I'd prefer to have it as awesome background music for driving or grilling meat, but it would be a shame to miss such an honest recording...

I see I am no closer to actually reviewing this collection than when I began... I think I will try a track-by-track approach for the virtue of familiarity...

Orphans

Orphans is by far the most haunting and daunting on the entire album... The melody invites me in as beck marks his territory with stark clarity... I can enjoy it, but I catch myself feeling like the luckiest orphan in the world... Very catchy...

Gamma Ray

Gamma Ray is a slam bam single I am sure... It reminds me of a 70's cross between the clash and pink floyd, with a bit of nick drake's resurrected essence spun from a turntable... It is towards the end of this song that I know I am hooked on the album and get the urge to either flee... It is either this option or acclimatizing myself to Beck's wavelength...

Chemtrails

Chemtrails is tragically beautiful... Beck is honestly communicating, accompanied by ethereal organs and moans in the background... To express the irony of pollution causing such serenity, and to do it so well... This is why I love Beck... As the jam rolls toward the end of the song, I reflect that I am in unknown space... Where is he taking this starship?

Modern Guilt

Modern Guilt is the title track... It begins with a stalker feel, but with the realness and freedom that introspection can afford... "I'm a pawn piece in a human shield..." is a line from the song that jumps out... Like we are all part of this earth, for good or ill... What does it mean to be human? Does that imply we are guilty for the errors our race makes? If we take credit for the victories, we must certainly ponder the flaws as well... Musically, it's like Beck just finished a tour with the Turtles... It holds up alongside much of the 60's pop chart offerings as well...

Youthless

Youthless is classic Beck... The 'bomp, bomp, bomp...' from Information comes back again for a more polished flavor... This is a song that is carried by its vocal melody... I could wax many hours on what the lyrics mean... Safe to say can best be interpreted by you... But sandwiched in between two heavy hitters like MG and Walls, it becomes clear that a point is being driven home...

Walls

Walls is like a trip hop fantasy... Filled with glassy pads and blown-speaker drum beats, it is difficult to discern where Cat Powers' voice ends and the synthesiser begins... I challenge anyone to sit with this song for an extended period of time... But be prepared to come out of it ready to grow... An amazing tune, especially within the context of the album...

Replica

Replica is very much a refined '1000 B.P.M.' from the information... It's Beck getting his drum & bass flowing... I have heard mixed feelings on this song, but I wouldn't get too hard on it... Replica stands alone as an amalgam of 60's psychadelic pop crossbred with discotechno... It balances out the hard edges to come, as we discover in the next track...

Soul of a Man

Soul Of A Man grabbed me instantly... It sounds like soundgarden meets the beach boys! Or stone temple pilots meets abba... The bent up guitar riffs sizzle from the headset, and his electric vocals make me sit up with attention... Plus the subject matter asks what makes the soul of a man... My favorite subject... He ends with a rare fade out as well... Hmmm...

Profanity Prayers

Profanity Prayers is yet another poignant powerpunch... The guitars are way too much, if one looks for the Air vibe of years past... But to use the word punk would take away from it... It reminds me of the who's energy, at times... As this whole album, the message is in your face as well as all over Beck's... "Who's gonna answer?" is the way to ask this question, for he's not saying your prayers are profane... Just pointing out that if they were they might be worthless...

Volcano

Volcano is one of my favorites... It's Beck treating us to a ballad after such turbulent troubadouring... Uber honest once again... One line says,"I been riding on this train so long, I don't know if you or me who's driving us into the ground..." Wow! The courage to point out it's a screwed up view, the willingness to suggest that it might be you, and the sensitivity to admit that it could be you-know-who... The irony at the end sweetens as he mentions the girl in the volcano, sacrificing herself for the world... He says he wants to go to the edge, but just to warm his bones... True Beck wit and wisdom, almost appearing to be the one roasting a marshmallow by the embers of a rising phoenix...

Beck-stravaganza!!!

Cmor — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:56:21 GMT

Beck is a man unlike any other, and that makes him like all of us... He's as close to a messiah figure as I can imagine, or a song buddha and an icon of individuality... I don't aim to start a holy war or anything, but the guy just doesn't ever seem to drop the ball when it comes to being unique and original... He doesn't even manufacture it, meaning his image... He doesn't need to... He's Beck... Ah, wax on... Wax off... There I go again...

I find that he inspires me to be more myself, which I feel has ever been his endeavor... Early on in his career he told an interviewer that everybody should make their own songs... This was before the days of mice-pace and eye-toons and you-tuber... Before any country joe and his fish could throw a looped beat on a computer and spit some mediocre journal entries and call it art... Still, he encouraged people to become all they could be, so I listened and wrote a hundred or more songs that year...

Today, I actually just wanted to blog about the fun things I do with Beck stickers... But that's what opening my Beck door does for me... To step in the ring is to allow my brain to perform loop-de-loops, and I always come up with some strange fruit... I even had a nearly finished blog very like this but different, which sadly bit the dust this afternoon, due to an overheated CPU and an absent-minded author who forgot to save prior to the freeze... But that's life!!! That's Beck as well... He's often writing about broken equipment and even included in his songs the noises these machines make in their death throes...

Even his name conjures creativity from me... If I venture into unBexpected territory, I call it a Bexperiment... If it sounds really superb I deem it Bexquisite... When I was living in China I rediscovered Beck through his album Sea Change... I instantly became a Bexpatriate... He sets a fine Bexample for all of us, and when I sound a little like him or draw from the same source, I am a Beck echo, or a Becko... Gosh, I am sure sounding like a Bextremist... And I could go on and on, but I don't want to Bexhaust you...

It's enough for me to know that you know that he knows that none of us know anything... heh heh... So I'll get back to the sticker topic... His last album, 'The Information...' was released with a blank white graph paper cover... Not even trying to be a legend, like the White album or the Graph album, it was simply a canvass for creativity to happen... There were dozens of amazing stickers in each album, and a person would have to buy several copies to find repeats... I still remember buying the regular album first, then the deluxe edition shortly thereafter... I got it more for the extra stickers than the two bonus songs... But I really like stickers...

There were portraits of Beck... Thought bubbles bursting, cloud horses making love, shadow puppets barking, alien tribal band members, surreal holes left unfilled, a man with a pinball face... And much more... After I covered my beach guitar with them, and designed my graph paper cover, I still had an ample surplus... I have given them randomly to children, stuck them at odd bus stops, and even slapped them on Malaysian currency and sent them right back to Beck himself... What fun they offer me in a gluesome guerrilla way!!!

The peak of my Beckstravaganza stickerfest was a blank book I began about when 'The Information' came out... I stuck them on several pages throughout the book, though leaving lots of room for my words... Little did I know that in the following 3 months I would completely fill the entire book with my wackless poetry, writing around or about the engaging little stickers... I also used many other magazine images or found 2-D objects, taking the spirit of the Beck stickers to a new level...

So in the past two years I have randomly collaged with the stickers, which I would like to share with you...

The Malay money I picked up in Kuala Lampur amid a layover from China to India... I ought to do this with some U.S. dollars and then recirculate them... Just imagining that makes me giggle, heh heh...

Then I got an insurance advertisement in the mail that just asked one question... "Why is this woman smiling?" I laughed at the bizarre irony even before I defaced or refaced it... Does this woman NEED a reason to smile? Philosophically, the advertising world shattered all moral mores with this one... If our society has come to a juncture where we need to ask why someone smiles, then we need to learn from the blissfully enlightened two-year-olds at a daycare...

Last but not leased is a 1950's football card that just made me laugh so hard I turned it into a fridge magnet... The cards came from my deceased father, who pasted them all into a book when he was a child... I received them in my teenage years and could only see them then as worthless nostalgia... Until I went through them all this last winter and realized they have super funny images in a posing-too-hard way...

Here's the one I gave away as a fridge magnet for Christmas... My friend recently scanned it and sent it over so I could share it with you... Thanks Naomi... And what a NAME this guy has, eh?!? John Kreamcheck!!! I did NOT black out his tooth! It came to me that way... This is from when sports heroes were normal people who didn't need to have perfect celebriteeth...

When all is said undone, it's all about the fun... Beck has a blast usually, which in turn teaches others to be free and have their own fun as well... I hope the next several years are kind to him...

Beck, My Patron Saint...

Cmor — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:36:51 GMT

Beck is my hero...
My muse...
My guero...
My good news...

I discovered he's coming to Bumbershoot this summer, and have been on bliss ever since... On top of that, he's about to release a new album called, 'Modern Guilt...' July 8th is now a CMOR holiday...

Click here to hear 'Chemtrails...'

It would only get better If I can somehow hang out with him, let his Beckness rub off on me... Maybe an interview would suffice for now...