Beck

Beck's 2005 full-length Guero revealed the folk-rock-rap-whatever artist's usual ironic self-awareness. The title, for one, translates to "white boy," belying a record drizzled with country twang, Mexican slang, grungy hip-hop, orchestral bossa nova, and electronica funk. Out of that mélange comes Guerolito, on which different producers have remixed every Guero...

By Sam Eifling

January 5, 2006

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Beck's 2005 full-length Guero revealed the folk-rock-rap-whatever artist's usual ironic self-awareness. The title, for one, translates to "white boy," belying a record drizzled with country twang, Mexican slang, grungy hip-hop, orchestral bossa nova, and electronica funk. Out of that mélange comes Guerolito, on which different producers have remixed every Guero track. The result is an album that displaces Beck's blues with a pseudo-dance-floor sheen, and while the former is missed, the latter seems a more natural fit for this premillennial ironist. On "Girl," French electronica duo Octet omits the song's least appealing vocals, which happen to be the hook ("heeeey, my summer girl"), and replaces it with a woeful sigh. John King's "Rental Car" also contains a counterintuitive masterstroke: steamrolling the original song's harpsichord lines, some of the prettiest phrases on Guero, into an indulgent outer-space synth beat that thumps like a danceable phaser fight. At the bottom of the album is a previously unreleased track, "Clap Hands," on which Beck teams with Odelay and Guero accomplices the Dust Brothers. Like so much of Guerolito, "Clap Hands" is good, clean booty-wiggling fun. It is Beck with the corners rounded, Guero as strawberry-lubed gel cap.

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