Album of the week: Beck

BECK: MODERN GUILT
****
XL, £10.99

A FEW months ago, Beck's tenth album was barely a glimmer in his eye. There'd been no thoughts of musical direction, no bare bones of songs, no experimental forays into the studio and certainly no release date. But these are odd and inventive times for the dissemination of music. Without warning, Radiohead can "rush-release" an album they have been working on for five years, creating a commercial sensation without the aid of a record company.

Other artists are following their example to some extent, by keeping things simple, speedy, and direct. Every element of Modern Guilt, from the music to the minimal artwork, has been put together in a flurry of intensive activity over a period of weeks, creating a concentrated buzz of anticipation in the world outside the studio.

For some time now, fans have only had promo shots of Beck looking like a refugee from a spaghetti western to go on. Then it was mooted that he was working with superproducer Danger Mouse. More buzz. In mid-May, the single Chemtrails was deliberately leaked online and speculation mounted that Modern Guilt, as it was not yet titled, would arrive like a thief in the night. The Raconteurs pulled a similar stunt with their second album Consolers Of The Lonely earlier this year – although, Jack White being Jack White, it contained about twice the amount of material as Beck has produced here.

The original plan was to keep each song to a pithy two minutes. Although he hasn't quite stuck to that, he does bang out ten songs in just over half an hour, several of them ending abruptly or drifting into the ether prematurely. As a result, although Modern Guilt sounds beautiful, even ravishing in places, it is not always that satisfying.

Cat Power appears as a guest vocalist on a number of tracks but you wouldn't notice her imperceptible contribution if her name wasn't on the credits, which is a shame. But the collaboration with Danger Mouse – like Beck, a great fan of pop exotica from the 1960s and 1970s and quite the eclectic musical archivist with his own projects – is a natural fit, so much so that the arresting 21st century beat pop of Gamma Ray actually sounds like it could have been lifted off a Gnarls Barkley album.

Beck, like Gnarls vocalist Cee-Lo, is quite a one for expressing emotional lassitude and malaise over a contrastingly peaceful or perky soundtrack. He's been at it ever since his first hit, the idiosyncratic Loser. "Need a teleprompter for my life" he intones here on Youthless, which is less a song, more a brooding electro-hop mantra. "I lost my bearings ten minutes ago... misapprehension is turning into convention... don't know what I've done but I feel afraid" he persists on the title track, which offers a rather groovy and upbeat musical framework for such urban paranoia.

But he's not just concerned with his own head or immediate environment. Modern Guilt references ice-caps and hurricanes. On psych-pop track Orphans, he surveys a ravaged landscape, helpless in the face of a fragile world. There is more eco-Armageddon on Chemtrails, an album highlight with its blissed-out vocals, mountainous, reverb drums and Floydian proggy soundscape. Beck is not waving but drowning, yet this is a song to float away on.

It is tempting to interpret lines such as "we do the best with the souls we've been given, because you know we're nothing special to them, we're going some place they've already been" – from the rounded, folky Walls – in the light of his adherence to the church of Scientology. Often, it is just not possible to grasp what he is on about here. He takes seemingly random word association to head-scratching lengths on robust, grungy indie rocker Profanity Prayers and lifts some of Thom Yorke's abstruse lyrical schtick ("these antibodies learn to be the disease"), as well as his almost perverse avoidance of a vocal melody on Replica.

He makes another brief musical diversion on Soul Of A Man, a low-slung blues rock number with gnarly visual imagery, delivered in his trademark slacker style, before reaching closing track, Volcano, by which time he sounds ground down by the weight of the world, exhibiting an exquisite hangdog melancholy only rivalled by Eels and Elliott Smith.

However, his final thoughts display a kernel of hope: "I'm going to that volcano, I don't want to fall in though, just want to warm my bones on that fire a while." Modern Guilt marks the end of Beck's major label contract – with those words, he's now on the cusp of something potentially liberating and limitless.