A horrible album (Midnite Vultures - Beck)

Member Name: FilmstarUK

Product:	Midnite Vultures - Beck
Date:	16/09/00 (108 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: Meaningless, annoying drivel

This is the album which finally proves to me what Beck is about. First, let's set one thing straight about Midnight Vultures: this album does not represent a radical departure for Beck, either musically or emotionally. If anything, MV is a distillation of all that Beck has done before, a kind of over-produced greatest hits package wrapped around the pretense of a New Sound.

It's Beck on 45. It's just the same vacuous material with which Beck has made a career, received absurdly fervent critical acclaim, and, until now at least, managed to dupe the music intelligentsia, who deserve to be duped in any case. Sure, Beck is trying his best to break the Sexx Laws; using banjos and funky bass riffs and the by now Beck-patented whirly-woo cheesy synth loops; invoking trysts in Hyundais and all matter of naughty material that can never quite manage to sink to the level of true sleeze, try though he might. But, man, if there was ever a fellow on the face of the earth who does not know how to rock, it is Beck Hansen. If Michael J. Fox had gone to art school, this is the kind of music he would create.

In fact, MV does not rock so much, there is an almost apocalyptic feel to it. It seems as though that in the long War of Rock 'n Roll Youth, which you could argue began with Buddy Holly, the final blow against us has been struck by the adults, and this blow comes in the squeamish and supremely clever form of Midnight Vultures. The songs here are so arid, so devoid of any emotion whatsoever-even irony or bitterness-that if you've got a heart that still beats you'll be running for an old Replacements album with a tear in your eye before you can get half-way through Beck's aluminum funk of Nicotine & Gravy.

Ostensibly, Beck's intention with Midnight Vultures was to create a 'party album'. Don't buy it - not his contention, not the album. This is a party album for lab mice, or lobotomized dot.com employees, perha
ps, but not anyone who might really be inclined to find a soundtrack for a wild night. What distinguishes this album just slightly from his previous efforts is that he has at last achieved a true perfection of meaninglessness, where his other albums were always tainted here and there by glimpses of genuine feelings and beliefs, shallow and infrequent through they were. The music on MD is extraordinarily clever and extraordinarily uninspired. Lyrically Beck destroys at once any notion that he intends to bestow upon his fans an AC/DC style romp, with brittle phrases such as "Shining like crystal tiaras/Ghettos and grey Rivieras" on "Broken Train", which manages at once to be spoiled, arrogant, and utterly empty.

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