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After years of strong production from funky, white-boy word twister Beck, The Information given to us in 2006 felt like maybe he was losing a bit of steam. An effort pushed along at times by Nigel Godrich's production, it was lacking in that constant rhythmic propulsion usually found in Beck's work.
And now, for the second release in a row, Modern Guilt feels more like a vehicle for its producer, Danger Mouse, than it does for Mr. Hansen.
Remember the LP jacket for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan? How about Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue? Or maybe the cover of all covers Abbey Road by The Beatles? What’s the most obvious thing that gets overlooked in all these classic covers? The person behind the camera.
Fortunately, there’s a woman preserving this amazing art form. Autumn de Wilde has quietly been taking some of the most striking and memorable photos of musicians in the past decade or so. Her clientele includes the likes of Elliott Smith, The Decemberists, The White Stripes, Jenny Lewis, Devandra Banhart, Built to Spill, Spoon, Death Cab For Cutie and Beck – in all cases her work is unmistakable. Take a second to follow the jump and admire some of these awesome sleeves and visit her website if you get a chance.
Guest Article by Jonny Lupsha
Video game music has seen a thirty-year transition from silence to orchestrated scores by modern classical composers that was so smooth, it's hard to imagine how it all happened.
Any gamer worth his or her salt remembers what they heard the first time they flipped on the NES and prepared for the quest to slay Ganon, Bowser, Dracula or Mother Brain. My brother and I would run from the other end of the house every time we heard my dad throwing his first punches in Kung Fu. Little eight-minute MIDI symphonies seemed as good as it could get and, many would argue, still are.
The next logical step was the analog keyboard version of Alice in Chains' "Angry Chair" in Doom II, which might as well have been my CD collection in a video game.
Trent Reznor's score for Id’s Quake was, to me, mind-blowing. The eerie industrial-ambient drones – complete with embedded grenade-bouncing sounds in one of the tracks – chilled me to the bone. I had a running conspiracy theory that violence-inducing soundwaves were hidden in that album and experimented on it for months on end. Years later, Akira Yamaoka's Silent Hill scores paralleled Reznor's Quake score for the survival horror series.
CD Review: "The Information" by Beck 
We all know Beck is a genius. He's shown us over his career that he can be a funky dancer, a shoe gazer, a singer/songwriter, and a rapper. So when you've done all that, and have come down off the cloud of the amazing Spanish-Influenced Guero, where do you go? What do you do if you're Beck? It's hard to say. But his producer Nigel Godrich had some ideas.
For the first five tracks of The Information, you're coerced into thinking the album is going to be a laid-back rehash of the solid grooves found on Midnight Vultures. At first, you're really pleased with the progress. Opener "Elevator Music" has Beck rhyming over heavy, thumping bass, dry snapping drums before opening up into a shimmering synth-laden chorus. Second track, and arguably The Information's strongest "I Think I'm In Love," borrows the playful bass from the song before, but employs a ringing U2 reminiscent piano and gorgeous vocal harmonies. Third cut "Cellphone's Dead" bounces between a Donna Summer 70's flashback and slapping Moog hits on the verses. The voice over of "One by one I'll knock you out" permeates your thought and you start to get the feeling this album is going to be an absolute classic as it continues. It switches over to "Strange Apparition" and you're pulled in further. The slow piano-clanging breakdown in the middle houses some of Beck's most earnest and bluesy singing in years. Number five is where you start recognizing that The Information is about to take sharp turn to ambience. Still, "Soldier Jane" is nice and warm, and the pads in the background smolder like a fire carrying the heat of Beck's somber melody to your heart.
Six is where the album really goes awry. Whether for good or bad, I've yet to decide, but "Nausea" shows an odd irritation in Mr. Hansen's voice and it fades shortly into "New Round." This song reveals producer Godrich's idea of creating a swelling, slow hum of a record. The tracks start all sounding like forgotten B-Sides of Sea Change and other Beck records. Occasionally, the rhythms return to the disc, but from this point on, they're all subdued and Beck's voice seems distant, lost in the blur of compression. The relentless floating is only once broken up by the bombastic flow of "1000 BPM," and The Information winds slowly and methodically to the somber 10 minute ending track, capped off by creepy spoken word passages about space travel.
Then the realization hits you that Nigel and Beck have tricked you into delving deep into an atmospheric, post-Apocalyptic wasteland and given you a strange choice. Maybe this was the plan all along. Very much like Radiohead's Kid A, Beck brings you to this foreboding crossroads after the immediately accessible Guero.
Ultimately The Information is what you make of it. It can either be a deep masterpiece, or garbage depending on your listening devotion, but it's quite possible I will decide that before I decide which stickers to put on the "Make-Your-Own-Album-Cover."
Download Beck's The Information on iTunes 
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