Beck’s Midnight Vultures
Walking into the big HMV in downtown Toronto last week, I looked up to see a ten-foot tall pair of zippered hot pink pants leering down at me with a suggestive tilt to their hips. On a fluorescent green background, these pants (with a zigzag flash of neon bursting from the crotch, no less) make up the eye-assaulting front cover of Beck Hansen’s new album, Midnite Vultures. Racked up on the record store displays like a wall of lime and cherry sherbet, these CDs screamed for immediate consumption. Despite the fact that someone had already slipped me a pre-release MP3 of the album, the colours mesmerised me and I reached out and bought. I’m glad I did because the real thing sounds bright and alive next to the squashed, bit-packed MP3.
The rest of the packaging follows suit: more optical violence in pink, orange and green swirls and paint can squiggles; dancing people with spiky space-age afros and jelly-bean eyes; a mostly naked hotel room scene featuring a pensive Mr. Hansen and a pair of swinging young ladies with faces artfully obscured by graffiti, fried eggs, and melting chocolate. Funky, garish, and a little surreal: you have an idea of what you’re getting into before you press play and the music delivers it. Who says you can’t judge a book by its cover?
This disc has certainly been hyped. Magazine covers, giant-sized display pants, New York Times articles — Beck is everywhere. After the world-weary blues ‘n’ bossa of his last disc, Mutations (which, I am told, was heavily influenced by the 1968 self-titled album of the Brazilian band Os Mutantes), word was that Beck was going to return to the sampled and looped style of Odelay. Well, word was only partly right. Yes, the drum loops and samples are here and there but the live band that played Mutations has also returned intact. It is a special joy that Roger Joseph Manning Jr. has returned to fill up the empty cracks and spaces in the music with the burbles, chirps, swoops and other strange twitterings of his aviary of vintage synthesizers.
Rather than return to his style of 1996, Beck has gone back even farther in order to plunder some treasured musical stylings of previous decades and fashion an end-of-the-millenium party album. Beck wears a lot of musical masks here and more than one of them resemble the squiggly-named purple highness who forever associated “1999″ and “party” in the lexicon of pop. Check out the falsetto howls of “Peaches & Cream”: close your eyes and it’s easy to imagine that Beck is fronting the Revolution or the New Power Generation. (Or if you’re a recovered obsessive academic like me, check out tracks 12 and 16 of Prince, the Hits 2, “Peach” and “Cream”.) Now listen to the break in “Nicotine & Gravy” after the “A Day in the Life” orchestral buildup — it’s Wendy and Lisa! On the last track, “Debra”, Beck pulls a 70s soul bedroom wail, again worthy of Prince’s own achievements in the genre, this time putting a sly spin on the old boy-meets-girl, boy-propositions-girl story:
“I want to get with you!
Oh girl,
And your sister.
I think her name is Debra.”
Beck does a swinging horn-heavy 60s number in “Sexx Laws”. He plays the LA rapper in “Hollywood Freaks”. He does 80s robo-techno in “Get Real Paid” and then turns around and gives us a Led Zeppelin tribute in “Milk & Honey”. The disc is full of ear candy and musical surprises done with a skill and self-aware sense of humour that make you smile: “Sexx Laws” has a BANJO break, for heaven’s sake! The choruses are catchy and the grooves are infectious. “Mixed Bizness” is particularly ass-moving and its absurd rhymes sum up the musical approach to the album: “I’m mixing business with leather/ Christmas with Heather… And make all the b-boys scream”. Beck mixes his R n’ B with his Country, his techno with his soul, and pushes it all out onto the dance floor.
Beck’s lyrics are a surreal blend of sleazy sex, power, money, the global village, and a dash of pure nonsense. Half the time Iºm not sure what he is getting at but the images are as bizarre and stimulating as the music is eclectic. There are no grand statements here: Midnite Vultures is an exercise in funk and fun and it’s wholly successful.
Don’t miss the hidden track!
