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Herald rating: 4/5
The time when Beck Hansen could do no wrong has long since passed. It's been 10 years since his breakthrough Odelay and he's spent the intervening years trying not to repeat himself, often with mixed results.
This has him reunited with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, who brought a clarity to Beck's sonic clutter on his best post-Odelay albums Mutations and SeaChange. Here, they and regular Beck backers deliver an album welding the psychedelic pop ambitions of Mutations to Mr Hansen's freaky funk blues, to often brilliant effect. It's a head-spinningly rich album that's sample-heavy arthouse hip-hop one moment, Womad-strength rhythm the next, with occasional interludes of folk-rock and synthpop.
In the space of a few songs it's doing rollicking-piano Stones things on Strange Apparition, Teutonic synthesizer drones on Soldier Jane and frenetic electro-blues on Nausea. And so it goes, possibly for too long, in its 20 tracks and the usual caveat about the substance of his freewheeling raps apply, even if songs like Movie Theme share the contemplative lyrical bent of SeaChange. Equally dazzling, The Information is well worth getting overloaded by.
Label: Interscope
