MUSIC

BECK
The Information
Beck has trafficked in strangeness and opacity for so long that he's now able to surprise just by saying what he means. Two tracks into The Information, listeners will hit a song called "Think I'm In Love" that's about exactly what its title suggests, as Beck sings from the position of someone who thinks he's in love, but is forced to admit, "it makes me kind of nervous to say so." That vulnerability resurfaces on "Movie Theme," in which a lush, Eno-like soundscape gives way to lines like "carry my heart like a soldier with a hand grenade." That sentiment is so sincere that it's sure to shock fans used to much more opacity. Even the mournful 2002 album Sea Change rarely cut this close to the bone.

The Information is at least partly about how love makes us uneasy, but Beck has rarely sounded this comfortable being Beck. Where last year's Guero sounded like a not-quite-right reprise of all his old moves, The Information makes for a much more satisfying return to past Beck sounds, and one that points the way to the future. Previously responsible for Beck's lush, quiet albums Sea Change and Mutations, Nigel Godrich here mixes that approach with the cut-and-paste sounds usually found on Beck's Dust Brothers-produced albums. Flutes and harmonies mix with antique computer voices. Organic rhythms turn mechanical and back again. Non-sequitur coffee-shop raps give way to gorgeous croons.

There's nothing here that Beck hasn't done before, but it sounds unexpected once again, which is a fitting development for an artist who made his name repurposing old material in unexpected ways. Here, he's done a Beck on himself, and built a stronger, funkier, more moving Beck in the process.



THE DECEMBERISTS
The Crane Wife
Rating: 8.4/10

For a few years now, the Decemberists' stagey, hyperliterate folk-rock has played well at indie labels Hush and Kill Rock Stars. The quintet has occupied a small community-theater space with gleefulness and confidence, but now it's accepted a scholarship to Capitol Records, which means a larger stage and a bigger audience. Can the band still project, or will its voices be lost in a cavernous auditorium, rejoined only by crickets and barely stifled coughs of boredom? Will nine-minute mariner epics play in Peoria?

Given the band's graduation from minor to major leagues, The Crane Wife may prove to be the most crucial record the Decemberists will release in their lifetime. Fortunately, their fourth album further magnifies and refines their strengths. Winsomely balancing frivolity and gravity, the Decemberists assemble an oddball menagerie of the usual rogues and rascals, soldiers and criminals, lovers and baby butchers-- but they've got a lot more tricks up their sleeves than previous albums had hinted. The Crane Wife employs an impressive variety of styles and sounds to tell Meloy's imaginative stories: There's the band's usual folk-rock, honed to an incisively sharp point, but they also deploy a smuggler's blues ("The Perfect Crime"), a creepy lullaby ("Shankill Butchers"), a Led Zep stomp ("When the War Came"), and, perhaps most divisively, a multipart prog track ("The Island") that stretches well past the 10-minute mark. No epic chantey this time, though.

Meloy's inventive songwriting is the binding force, emphasizing character but remaining ever in thrall to stories, savoring the way they always play out to the same conclusions. Along with the homosexual undertones that have informed Decemberists songs from every album, he jettisons most of the archetypes that inspired Picaresque and cuts his characters loose in their own tales. They still do what they're fated to do-- the thieves thieve and run amok, the lovers love and die tragically, the soldiers soldier on and pine for peaceful homes-- but they seem to do it more out of free will than authorial design. Meloy focuses mainly on matters of war ("But O did you see all the dead of Manassas/ All the bellies and the bones and the bile?") and love ("No, I lingered here with the blankets barren/ And my own belly big with child"). On the duet "Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)", Meloy plays the part of an errant, possibly dead Civil War soldier while singer-songwriter Laura Veirs cameos as his "sweetheart left behind." It's Cold Mountain writ poignantly small, its sweet, wordless chorus perfectly life-size. Lumbering menacingly, the martial march of "When the War Came" smells of gunpowder and singed hair, although it sounds like it's anchored in Neverland despite trying to comment on real-world events.

Meloy's taletelling will always define the Decemberists, but The Crane Wife puts as much weight on the music as on the lyrics, and here the band gels into a tight, intuitive unit. The musicians give each song a particular spark and character, not just reinforcing the lyrics but actively telling a story. They create a breezy eddy of guitar strums and piano chords to enhance a windborne melody and an undercurrent of peril on "Summersong", and the tragedy of "O Valencia"-- any good song about star-crossed lovers must end in death-- is countered by the pep of the music, especially Chris Funk's ascending and descending guitar, which seems to take a particular glee in the inevitable denouement. The band isn't just able-bodied, but ambitious to boot. It makes the brainy prog of that monster second track, a distillation of the musical reach of their 2003 EP The Tain, sound like a natural extension of their base sound. They troll confidently from the rumbling overture and heated exposition of "Come and See" to the final rueful notes of "You'll Not Feel the Drowning". The song is chockablock with progisms-- organ runs, dampered cymbals, laser synths-- but manages to shake off the genre quote marks as the band jam with convincing menace.

Their range allows them to be precociously diverse, but everything fits naturally. The Crane Wife sounds like their most shapely album to date, resembling a spirited story arc in its set-up, rising action, climax, and resolution. In this structure the three title segments, despite essentially bookending the tracklist, form the album's thematic centerpiece, the music and story meshing gracefully and tenderly to retell a Japanese fable. "The Crane Wife 3" opens the album with a ruminative flourish as John Moen's drums push the sensuous thrust of the music and Meloy's delivery of the lines "each feather it fell from skin" colors the resignation of "I will hang my head hang my head low." It opens the album en medias res, setting up the subsequent story-songs as the narrator's rueful reminiscences.

"The Crane Wife 1 and 2" comprise a medley towards the album's end, starting slow and soft but gradually reaching crescendo in an unfurling finale, with Meloy breaking the word "heart" into multiple syllables over an unraveling drum beat. Restrained yet resonant, the song's (and album's) climax is a remarkable moment. As it segues into the rousing coda of "Sons & Daughters", the Decemberists sound like a band that knows exactly where they're going and won't be satisfied until you come along for the trip.

MORE ON BECK

Given Beck’s link to Scientology, you’d be excused for wrinkling your brow when you found out his next record was insinuatingly titled “The Information.” For a group that goes out of its way to keep light from shedding on any of the elementary tenets of their curious ‘religion,’ it seemed apropos for Beck, at least on record the group’s most playfully odd celebrity to issue such a shady WTF. Long an artist entangled and tripped up by so many contexts and genre signifiers as to be long since free of any, it was difficult to imagine Beck giving us such an open-handed glimpse--free of metaphor, flippant ramshackle beat poesie, or hip-check wordplay--into his spirituality, especially one already so fiercely topical. More than that, the notion of Beck subsiding into the giddy L. Ron Hubbard promotion of celebs like Tom Cruise and John Travolta was, well, nauseating. I mean, this is our Beck, more than ten years ours and Tom Cruise is just a nutty fucker. For better or worse then, The Information is both exactly what you feared it might be and also a document of some of Beck’s best groove-based material since Midnite Vultures.

With Nigel Godrich in the booth for the third time, Beck spent over three years crafting the songs for The Information. As such, it’s not surprising that its musical bedding is decidedly uneven. Gone, almost completely, is the love-nausea of Sea Change. In its stead, Beck goes back to the mangled, junkyard pop of his youth, mixing broken-porch funk and beat-patterned shout-alongs into an album far more groove-oriented than even the underrated Guero. These songs, almost across the board, are bound to their bottom, as Beck uses his ear for antique nouveau to create the sort of astonishingly simple but hypnotic rhythms that he’s been patterning since Mellow Gold. “Elevator Music” and “No Complaints” fume with smokehouse funk, crashing, churning bits of Odelay-themed bass-pop. “Nausea” is perfectly titled: a woozy, jungle-tangle of clanging cow-bells and stiff bass amidst monkey-voices and a cloying multi-tracked chorus, while “Think I’m In Love” finds Beck shyly reacquainting himself with love over a thicket of pianos, strings, and a paperbag writer’s bass. “New Round”’s frail beauty is a shot in the arm for Beck here; acoustic guitars flicker with trampled heart tones and a subtle drum pattern-knowingly nudged to the back—as he hums fractured couplets about chain-link winds and blackboard nights.

More than with either Mutations or Sea Change, you can hear Godrich’s rich instrumental layering beneath the rhythms. A perfect headphone album, strings, shards of voice and singing, simmering static, harmonica, synths, and bell-toned electronics seem to almost collapse into their places. Sometimes, these deep interludes and bridges distract from a song’s central melody however (as on the otherwise fantastic Headhunters-jive of “Cell Phone’s Dead”) and threaten its composition, but typically they serve instead as interesting flourishes.

Still, at fifteen tracks and over an hour, perhaps Beck needed a stiff editor more than the comfort of a familiar producer. Even given his notoriety for pastiche, each of his best albums formed a remarkably cohesive whole; he tried on different styles between records, but within each one, the tracks held together quite well. Much of The Information lives out its three-year birth in song-sketches and productions that simply don’t settle well with the rest of the album. The Beggars Banquet-era gilded piano stomp of “Strange Apparition” would have made a great b-side but feels force-fed to its neighbors, and “Soldier Jane” fails to progress beyond its staid drum pattern. With “Dark Star,” Beck amazon tracks the Headhunters again, but compounded by harmonica breakdowns and what sounds like a leftover string section from Sea Change, it’s garbled and confused. “1000BPM”’ is likewise cluttered and tuneless, a second-cousin to the jarring studio-mongering of “Sweet Sunshine” or “High 5 (Rock the Catskills).”

Aside these musical missteps though, Beck’s queer mystical refrains ultimately seem far more puzzling. And this is where you’ll have to decide just how much WTF you’ll swallow from your pop stars. One can’t help but feel Scientology’s extraterrestrial pull beneath lines like “When the information comes/we’ll know whom we’re made from” (the title track) or “ Looking for the ladder in the stratosphere/so I can be happy/let my bones melt away” (“Movie Theme”). Old Xenu himself, maybe even his entire Galactic Confederacy, is shadowed in the lines; certainly, in any case, there’s plenty of what Scientologists might refer to as ‘space opera’ to be heard. Closer “Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton,” in fact, is a squatter’s symphony of such allusions. After a shredded tape reel with snippets of both “Elevator Music” and “Cellphone’s Dead” and a toxic expanse of sound passages and reinventions, comes a spoken word outro between Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers (?!!?) supposedly about how the best album ever made might sound: “it has to tell you how to live/it is an instruction guide/subtle, it doesn’t push/it nudges, it entices, or it seduces/it has to encompass the whole world/everything that has been, is and will be/and could take it into space/and that’s why you need a spaceship/cause that’s ultimately what space travel was all about.” But maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe, with The Information, Beck’s just talking about spaceships. You know, like the rest of us. . .


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