This CD comes with a sheet of really cool stickers and a blank sleeve for you to make your own personalised CD cover. Listening to the album, you also get the impression that Polydor could easily put together a website which would enable you to paste together your own Beck album using a handful of one-bar samples. All you’ll need is a few hip hop loops and a bossa nova beat from an old Casio keyboard; you’d match these to a couple of Moog basslines, some rootsy acoustic guitar riffs, a bit of dobro and a few old samples (Serge Gainsbourg, Stevie Wonder, Afrika Bambaataa). Scatter all these onto a music sequencing package and top them with a few off-the-peg FX-laden vocals reciting surrealist space-age doggerel and – hey presto! – you have your own long-awaited Beck album.
That’s not to say this is a bad LP at all. But, where Beck’s music once felt both thrillingly futuristic and comfortingly antique, it’s now lost any ‘wow’ factor. You get the impression that Beck only moves off autopilot when producer Nigel Godrich pushes him into self-consciously ‘weird’ territory, like on the junkyard gamelan of ‘1000 BPM’ and ‘Motorcade’ or the bleepy avant hip hop of ‘We Dance Alone’ and ‘Cell Phone’s Dead’. Otherwise we get the impression that Beck desperately needs a much more ambitious project to get his teeth into.
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4 comments
The reviewer is wrong. This album is superb, it's definitely got the wow factor. I don't need to write anymore to justify why this album should have 6 stars, just listen to it.
nice
i thought this album was rubbish becks best album is one foot in the grave and his worst is geurro. and this is definately geurro all over again. although strange apparation is a good attempt the production behind it gives it the air of a woman faking an orgasm and sayingit was really good.
i see where this is coming from. i would personally give it a 4 1/2 but it most definatly autopilot in many ways, there are a few obvious stunners however it is really well within his comfort zone, odelay had the energy, mellow gold the raw factor, mutations jaw dropping vultures wow and seachange classic. factors respectivly. however, whilst i think, cant quite decide, if its better than guero he is pushing the technology/artistrty side of the things, as said, he just needs to push himself musically.