Black tambourine

In all the hubbub of the recent week and a half, I've neglected to mention Beck's new album, Guero. Which is predictably great. It's a more modest, in some ways at least, album than, say, Midnite Vultures (what album isn't?): Beck isn't really the wacky 25 year old anymore. After Mutations, after Sea Change, a space, a human space, has opened up in his work for the un/non-ironic. Balladry, mood, melancholy. A piano. Strings. Here and there. That said, the album is still out there. Video game sounds, car horns "honking like a mariachi band," daffy na na choruses -- all that and more percolates in the mix. Guero just isn't designed to go off like a bomb. It isn't the throwback to Odelay some claim. It's a slowburn of wildfire.