Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker:
After making a logy album about heartbreak called “Sea Change,” in 2002, Beck Hansen decided to work again with the Dust Brothers, who produced his most high-spirited and coherent album, “Odelay,” in 1996. You might expect this reunion to result in an apologetic retreat from melancholy, and a valiant, ultimately Pyrrhic attempt to restart a party that’s long since over. But “Guero”(Interscope) sums up everything Beck is good at, like an imaginary greatest-hits album. The music combines the omnivorous collage of “Odelay” and the regret of “Sea Change” without chasing hipness or wandering into its own navel. The Dust Brothers make “Guero” both luscious and slightly odd, as if a hard drive’s worth of silvery, heavy sound files had been reorganized into a series of random but apt pairings.
More here.
